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THE REASON OF LIFE 



WORKS BY 

W. PORCHER DU BOSE, M.A., S.T.D. 



The Gospel in the Gospels 
Crown 8vo. 

The Gospel According to Saint Paul 
Crown 8vo. 

The Soteriology of the New Testament 
Crown 8vo. 

High Priesthood and Sacrifice 
Crown 8vo. 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO 



The Ecumenical Councils 
Crown 8vo. 

New York: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SON; 



THE REASON OF LIFE 



BY 

William Porcher DuBose, m.a,, s.t.d. 

AUTHOR OF "the SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT*' 

"the gospel in the gospels," "the gospel 

ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL," "hIGH PRIEST- 
HOOD AND SACRIFICE," ETC., ETC. 



LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO 

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET. NEW YORK 
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 

1911 



^-n 






Copyright, 1911 

BY 

I.ONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 



All rights reserved 



THE* PLIMPTON* PRESS 

[ W D • O] 
NORWOOD • MASS • U • S • A 



©CI.A300176 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE^ 

. I. The Principle of Upity — Introductory .... 1 

II. The Beginning 12 

III. The Origin and Evolution of Life 24 

IV. Life Encosmic and Incarnate 36 

V. The Glory of the Only Begotten 50 

VI. Grace to become Sons 62 

VII. The Process of Life Spiritual 76 

VIII. The Spiritual through the Natural 90 

IX. Love the Seminal Principle of Life 103 

X. Divine Love in Human Service 115 

XI. Christianity a Ministry of Life 126 

XII. Fellowship with God 138 

XIII. Christianity as a Witness ' . . 154 

XIV. The Blood that Cleanseth 169 

XV. The Comfort of Christianity 183 

XVI. The Way of Divine Knowledge 198 

XVIL Whom Else but God ? 213 

XVIII. What Else but Christ ? . . 229 

XIX. The Divinity and Deity of Jesus Christ .... 244 

XX. Christianity and Ethics 260 



THE REASON OF LIFE 



THE PRINCIPLE OF UNITY 

Introductory 

Revolutions, internal or external, in thought or in 
action, do not come except in a time or under condi- 
tions that have been prepared and are ripe for them. 
We are expected and commanded to be able to read 
the signs of the time. It is as criminal not to seize 
and use beneficent opportunity at its flood, as it is 
futile to exploit it at its ebb. We are moving now 
upon a very flood tide of opportunity. The thought 
of the world is upon and the demand of the time is 
for unity. We have entered upon an era of recon- 
ciliation and cooperation. 

This is evident in the most secular affairs of the 
world. The abolition of war may be many ages off, 
but there has never been anything like such a move- 
ment in the direction of it as we are now witnessing. 
So profound and general a raising of the question of 
arbitration and peace is in itself the surest prognostic 
of a progressive approximation to its solution such as 
will be at least the diminution and amelioration if 
not the actual extinction of war. 
2 1 



^ The Reason of Life 

So no less with economic and industrial warfare. 
The clash of capital and labor, of organized and free 
employment, of privilege and equality, of special and 
general interests, may be sounding louder than ever, 
but it is because the knell of all inequitable inequalities, 
and inevitable consequent strife, has been struck. The 
movement to meet and treat the disease in its source, 
to abolish industrial warfare by removing its cause in 
patent injustice, may not mean immediate and univer- 
sal equity and peace, but it does mean just as rapidly 
more of these as the really growing sympathy and 
fairness of men shall achieve. 

But it is the spirit of reconciliation in a wider 
field — that of religion — with which I am at present 
concerned. Not that the field of religion is sep- 
arable from or does not include all these secular 
questions and interests; nor that any reconciliation, 
any unity and cooperation, based upon the one only 
rock of love, of mutual service and sacrifice, is not in 
itself religion. On the contrary, religion is not, and will 
not be, either its true self or all itself, until all minds 
and hearts, all social relations and personal interactivi- 
ties of men, have become the Kingdom of God: until 
all life, individual or collective, industrial, political, 
national and international, has been taken into and 
become its sphere. 

Such a unity, it may be felt, is not for men but gods. 
But even a pagan philosophy bids us not, because we 
are mortal, to rest in or be satisfied with mortality, nor 
because we are human to ignore or neglect the manifest 



The Principle of Unity 3 

divine that is in us. Neither human reason nor the 
human conscience can set a Hmit to itself short of 
Eternity, Infinity, and Perfection. No matter how 
we may conceive or define the Divine, human Hfe has 
no end or meaning but in that unity and complete- 
ness which only Love is, and which we can all agree 
in worshipping as God. There is no impracticability 
in such an ideal except that of bringing ourselves to 
believe in and act upon it. That done, we should be 
quick and certain to find in it the one only principle 
that would make life really, perfectly, and blessedly 
practicable and realizable. 

But I come down to the familiar conflicts and dis- 
sonances of religion as they are popularly understood 
— such as, for example, that between religion and 
science. If there be any actual conflict between these, 
otherwise than in our apprehensions of them, it goes 
down beneath the thoughts of men (which science and 
religion are) into the eternal nature and reality of things. 
The issue, we may safely assume, has passed beyond 
that first stage of it in which the question was whether 
in the new light of science there was any place left for 
religion at all. There is consensus now both as to the 
objective ground and the subjective need of religion. 
Controversy has narrowed down to the relation between 
the immanent presence and operation of God in things, 
which we call nature, and the transcendent presence 
and operation of God with and in men, which we call 
grace. The growing reconciliation between nature 
and grace is, we must admit, due more to the insistences 



4 The Reason of Life 

of science than to the wisdom or reasonableness of 
current religion. The latter, in its wide separation 
tending to the divorce of grace from nature, was in a 
fair way of contracting itself to final exclusion from the 
world of the actual. In being brought more and more 
to recognize the essential naturalness and orderliness 
of grace, it has more than gained in coming to see the 
co-essential supernaturalness of nature: and so to 
anticipate, if not yet construe and understand, the 
ultimate unity and identity of the two. Thus religion, 
rescued by science from the danger of exclusion from 
the earth, is enabled to turn and show itself inclusive 
of all the earth. 

It is only an extension of the above to say a more 
general word upon the reconciliation of the conflicts 
between the counter truths of immanence and tran- 
scendence. These truths we have been brought per- 
force to see as not only counter but also complementary. 
The power which is neither nature nor ourselves, but 
formative and constitutive principle of both, is neces- 
sarily immanent and immanently necessary in nature 
— for otherwise nature would not be nature in its most 
essential attribute of fixed and reliable uniformity. 
And it is only in such an objective nature of constant 
invariability that we could possess or exercise our free- 
dom. But there is no more reason why the power that 
is nature should not also be a power that is not nature, 
than that we who are in and of nature should not also 
be above, or transcend, nature — as we know we do. 
There are in fact two truths which stand or fall together: 



The Principle of Unity 5 

One is God in nature and yet transcending nature; 
the other is human freedom and personaUty as part of 
nature, and yet, in the fact and exercise of selfhood, 
transcending nature. In making God's personahty 
and our own thus dependent upon each other, in our 
conception of them, we are not making God's per- 
sonaUty only what ours is: whatever be the infinite 
difference. His must include all that ours is. 

There is a kindred reconciliation to be effected in 
philosophy between the rival claims of idealism and 
pragmatism. Is religion an a priori fact or truth, to 
be ascertained and applied to human life? Or is it 
an a posteriori result deduced from and determined by 
human life? Is it whatever will perfect life and all its 
functions, as determined by experience? Or is it an 
antecedent and definite something, the knowledge and 
realization of which in human life will perfect it and 
its functions? Is there any reason why it may not be 
both? It is not a question of what religion is: both 
agree that it is what perfects life and all its functions. 
It is only the question of how what is religion is ascer- 
tained or known. And with regard to this, whatever 
may be the value of pragmatism, it is as useless and 
impossible without idealism as, for example, either 
deduction or induction would be without the other. 
We may as well speak of the conflict or contradiction 
between hypothesis and verification as that between 
idealism and pragmatism. I have long known that 
the final and only convincing proof of religion is the 
experience of what will perfect and complete human 



6 The Reason of Life 

life. But pragmatism, I should say, is not a source 
but only a test of the rival claims that bid for the lord- 
ship or mastery of human life. It is a fact that we are 
practically making truth and life as we go, by incor- 
porating into them in experience the things that make 
for them. But whence do we derive the manifold 
material which experience tests and sifts and excludes 
or includes as it finds it unfit or fit? Experience tries 
all things and uses or disuses, but never originates or 
creates. Certainly in that fullest life which we call 
eternal, pragmatism, as experimentation and deter- 
mination of values, is in need, for the source and 
supply of the theories or hypotheses upon which it is 
to pass judgments preparatory to inclusion or exclu- 
sion, of the very highest and purest idealism. 

Religion is the most experimental of all sciences. 
Our Lord was the most thoroughgoing of pragmatists. 
"Do," He says, "and ye shall know." If any man 
will live the true life, he will know that the life he lives 
is the true one by its completeness and blessedness. 
But he must have an idea, or hypothesis, of the true 
life as he lives it, and where does it come from? 
Would it come at all if there were no idealism? We 
are to "set to our own seal" even to the fact that 
God Himself "is true" — but where do we get the 
idea that God is true, to which we are to give the 
attestation of our experience? Given idealism as a 
source of ideas, not only of conjecture and adventure 
from within, but of inspiration and revelation from 
without — and then pragmatism is not only in order, 



The Principle of Unity 7 

but is the only true order of human truth or hfe. God 
and Christianity appeal to no other ultimate proof of 
themselves than the fact of their inherent and essential 
truth as attested by experience. The only convincing 
argument for God is found in the realized fact that 
"to know Him is to live, and to serve Him is to be 
free." The only credential of Jesus Christ is the fact 
that He is "the Way and the Truth" — the only way 
and the perfect truth of "Life" : the life of God in man 
and of man in God. Religion can never cease to sub- 
mit itself to the perpetual judgment of human experi- 
ence; nor experience to be directly responsible and 
accountable for its recognition of the reality of religion. 
They exist for each other, and their unity is the only 
solution of the question of life and destiny. 

There is another conflict just now being waged within 
the ranks and under the banner of Christianity, which 
can be settled only by reconciliation, and not by victory 
or defeat on either part. It is the question between 
the merely human divinity and the real deity of the 
person of Jesus Christ. In this controversy each side, 
in so far as it is honestly and sincerely Christian, is 
contending for the true half of a really indivisible 
whole; and the truth in each is included in and essential 
to that of the other. Christianity is nothing if it is 
not our identical and common humanity in the person 
of the man Christ Jesus coming (and come) by the 
necessary human process into the full realization and 
inheritance of its inherent divinity and divine Sonship. 
Nor could Christianity be this, if it were not also and 



8 The Reason of Life 

no less, on the other hand, God Himself self-realizing 
(and realized) in our humanity in the person of Jesus 
Christ, and there taking us all into a living union and 
unity with Himself. I can see myself and all humanity 
in every individual act or incident of the human life 
of our Lord — but also I can see all of God, and all 
that is divinest and best of God, in the person of Jesus 
Christ reconciling and uniting the world unto Himself. 
How shall I know Him or express Him? As deified 
humanity, or as humanized Deity? I believe that I 
can know Him as neither without knowing Him as 
both. The unity of two must be both and each. If 
I cannot find God as well as myself in Christ, I can see 
and know Him nowhere at all. 

I might multiply indefinitely these illustrations in 
part of a general process of reconciliation going on 
among or around us, but let us go behind them to one 
that includes them all. The ultimate and essential 
unity is that of spirit. God Himself is "One, in the 
unity of spirit." In the first place "God is Spirit — 
and they that worship Him must worship in spirit 
and in truth." Spirit is something infinitely more 
than mere incorporeality, freedom from "body, parts, 
or passions. " The spirit of God or of any other being, 
"the spirit that one is of," is the totality of one's atti- 
tude or disposition towards all other being. It is in 
this sense that we say that the Spirit of God, or that 
God Himself, is Love. God as manifested to us is 
expressed in terms of eternal, infinite, perfect love, 
grace, and fellowship (or oneness with). Love is 



The Principle of Unity 9 

Himself; Grace is love or Himself revealed, communi- 
cated, and imparted in Christ Jesus; Fellowship is all 
these received, shared, become ours in the unity of a 
common spirit, with God and Christ and with one 
another in Them. 

The Kingdom of God is nothing if it is not organized 
and ordered unity — unity with God and unity in God, 
unity of spirit, of law, of life. And the Church of God 
is no living thing if it is not something more than human 
organization — the divine organism and organ of unity 
human and divine. Unity is absolutely the first and 
the one thing: what is Love but oneness with God and 
with all else in Him? The Church is first "One" — 
and then, and therefore, *'Holy"; for what is holiness 
but the spirit of unity and love.^^ Then, next, it is 
"Catholic," for catholicity or universality is the nec- 
essary corollary of unity. And finally it is " Apos- 
tolic," simply because that which is one, must be so 
in sequence or time, as well as in extension or space — 
from beginning to end, as well as from end to end. In 
no less truth than all this is the Church the Kingdom 
of God, the Body of Christ, or the Temple of the Holy 
Ghost. 

Expediency, efficiency, economy, success as against 
failure, very existence as against threatened extinction, 
the last will and prayer and command of our Lord 
Himself, every dictate of common sense and impulse of 
common humanity, ought surely to furnish reasons 
enough and arguments enough for unity in Christianity. 
And these considerations have sufficed to turn all the 



10 The Reason of Life 

spirits and signs of the time in the direction of unity, 
and to make it the one problem and task of the age. 
But it is evident too that we have to go further back 
and deeper down than all these for the solution of the 
problem thus raised, for a reason cogent enough to 
compel and to preserve unity. We need to be brought 
to realize that religion and unity, that preeminently 
Christianity and unity, are identical things : we cannot 
sacrifice or surrender the one and preserve or possess 
the other. The Church, the Community and Com- 
munion of the Saints, the Body of Christ, the Organ of 
the Holy Ghost, is the unity of Christians with Christ, 
and with one another in Christ. 

The issue is fairly raised between the necessity of 
Christian unity and the fact of Christian divisions. 
The subordinate reconciliations that have to be effected 
before the oneness of the spirit shall find practical and 
visible expression in the unity of the Body of Christ, it 
might be discouraging to enumerate. The old question 
of the one and the many, unity in diversity and diver- 
sity in unity, will have to be practically settled in this 
large and difficult application of it. The adjustment 
between objective divine claims and subjective human 
verification and consent, between corporate or catholic 
authority and personal or party rights and liberties, and 
many other such issues, will have to be met and dealt 
with in detail. The first step, which will alone make 
the others possible, seems to be the only one at present 
proposed, and may be formulated as follows: 

First, Let unity be accepted by all as the principle 



The Principle of Unity 11 

and essence of Christianity, and faith in it, hope of it, 
and effort for it become the duty of every Christian. 

Second, Let each separate name or body of Chris- 
tians reahze and emphasize as much as possible what it 
has in common with the one whole Church of Christ, 
and efface as far as possible all divisive and individual or 
party elements, badges, or expressions. 

Third, Where differences are felt to be vital or impor- 
tant, let them be held in trust for all and not arrogated 
as the possession of a few or a part. 

Fourth. Let there be as much as possible of Christian 
intercourse, interchange, and cooperation; and in all 
conferences let there be the utmost of plain-speaking 
with as much as possible of mutual understanding and 
charity; let all the truth be spoken as each sees it, but 
let it be spoken in all the love of Christ. 

The present volume has no practical solutions to offer 
for the problems touched upon in this chapter. It goes 
before them all, and would only prepare and propose 
the spirit and temper in which they should be under- 
taken and may be solved. 



II 

THE BEGINNING 

ST. JOHN I. 1-3 

The Beginning described by St. John in the prologue 
to his Gospel is manifestly the absolute beginning, the 
origination of all being or existence in the universe in 
which we find ourselves. It is a logical rather than 
chronological conception; the "all things" included in 
it, in their successive "becomings," may have had no 
actual beginning at all in time; we cannot conceive of 
them as without beginning in thought, or without 
causal beginning. In whatever sense " Being " is eternal, 
it is not without dpxrj or principium, without some 
'^principle " of being. The Beginning we are to discuss 
is causative and constitutive, and not merely initiative. 

In what we may call either creation or evolution 
there is, in the language of an older philosophy, "form" 
as well as "matter." Which of the two is prior, and is 
cause or beginning of the other; whether form is but 
the incident or accident of matter, or matter is but 
the visibility or sensible expression of form, may be 
a question. The concrete universe is to appearance 
what we call material; but there is in it, we cannot but 
see, a reason, a meaning, a purpose, which we may call 
its "form." Is this "form, "or immanent reason, an 

12 



The Beginning 13 

incidental or accidental product of matter, or is it the 
real ^PXly an ideal informing principle, manifesting 
itself through and as matter? In a word, is eternal 
Reason the cause of matter, or is reason a late by- 
product of eternal Matter? 

What St. John has to say upon the point is as follows: 
That rationality is the jprius and principle of material- 
ity, as of all being or existence, visible and invisible. 
The material universe is a concrete expression of an 
ideal principle, which not only as first-cause gives it 
existence, but as final-cause gives it reason, meaning, 
and purpose. Indeed Final Cause or Purpose is the 
only first-cause or ultimate real cause at all: through 
it, and it alone, all things come into being and have 
their being. There is no origination or initiation save 
in reason: the reason of a thing is the sole actual cause 
of it. "In the beginning was Eternal Reason — intel- 
ligence, will, purpose. All things came into being 
through it; and without, or apart from it, nothing that 
exists had its being." The Reason of the universe 
does not work in or upon its matter as a material 
or stuff already in existence, or existing independently 
of itself. Primal Reason not only gives form to mat- 
ter, but itself furnishes the matter which it informs. 

Reason is in large part conceived and expressed by 
us in terms of the abstract and impersonal. We see 
reason in many a mere "thing" as something immanent 
in it and itself impersonal. But for the descriptive 
and explanatory clauses in which St. John affirms its 
divine personality, we might indeed so translate it in 



14 The Reason of Life 

the passage before us: "In the beginning was reason, or 
meaning and purpose; through it all things came into 
existence and have their being." From our lower point 
of view there is no cause why 6 Xoyos should be regarded 
as a Person, why it should be ''He" rather than "it." 
What, and why, is our lower point of view? How 
is it that so many thinkers are ready to recognize reason 
in the order of the world as the principle and cause of 
its being as well as of its order — who nevertheless 
hesitate to ascribe the world-reason to a Person, or to 
call it God? Is not this the explanation: That from 
our lower plane of understanding we are accustomed to 
see reason in things seemingly detached and separate 
from its personal source; and so come to treat it as 
itself a mere " thing " immanent in " things "? A 
wise and able organizer or an inventive genius may 
embody in an institution, a constitution, or even in 
a machine, rational principles of action or motion 
which might then survive their author and, as we 
say, run themselves. Similarly, men come to recog- 
nize reason in the universe, not merely as detached 
from its Author and running itself, but even as inde- 
pendent of any personal source — itself a thing im- 
manent in things. That what emanates from us — 
even the reason and order to which we have given 
permanent expression and form — may then go on 
after us and without us, should not lead to the infer- 
ence that God's thought or will or purpose may like- 
wise be detached from and go on independently of 
Himself. What proceeds from us is but rearrange- 



The Beginning 15 

ment of already existent and interacting things; what 
proceeds from Him is existence and interaction. 

The reason that is before all things, and is the formal 
and formative principle of all, St. John neither leaves 
in the air nor ascribes to the things themselves. 
Reason appertains to personality and is inseparable 
from it; they are distinguishable the one from the other 
only as personality is the necessary subject of reason, 
and reason the proper function of personality. The 
only excusable agnosticism is that which too much 
distrusts its own reason: which sees in the Subject of 
the eternal reason One who cannot be bounded by a 
concept or expressed by a name. St. John does not 
hesitate to ascribe the reason that is before all and 
is cause of all to a Person and call Him God. In 
ascribing our own personality to God, and so invest- 
ing Him with the most and the best that we are our- 
selves, we may be, and are, designating Him by what 
is infinitely less than Himself; we are certainly not 
ascribing to Him anything more than Himself, or 
anything that He is not. 

St. John identifies the reason of the world with God, 
just as the reason of a man is identical with his person- 
ality and inseparable from his personality or himself. 
But there is a sense and a respect in which, as has been 
suggested, a man's reason is separable from himself. 
When I have put myself into a work, or haye put my 
mind into a written argument, which are to survive 
me and even be potent when I no longer am in existence, 
what I have put into these is certainly I, and yet as 



16 The Reason of Life 

certainly not I. I say, It is not I but my mind, my 
thought, my will; but are not all these myself? Now 
when I have so uttered or outered myself, the utterance 
may, as we see, be so detached from me as to be inde- 
pendent of even my continued existence. So likewise, 
with a momentous difference, the world is God's 
utterance or outerance of Himself. The ideal, formal, 
formative principle in it, which we see so struggling, 
and often seemingly so ineffectually struggling, for 
adequate and full expression through it, is nevertheless 
His Logos, or Reason, or Word — which is Himself. 
But, for manifold reasons manifest to thought when 
carried out to its just conclusions, it is as essential to 
distinguish the reason or word of God as ideal and 
formative principle of the world, and immanent in it, 
from God Himself, as it is to identify it with Him. It 
might be said that the failure to properly distinguish 
is pantheism, the failure to properly identify is deism; 
while the proper adjustment of distinction and iden- 
tification is a true theism. The problem involved is 
the reconciliation of the counter truths of the imma- 
nence and transcendence of God. The difficulty may 
be primarily a metaphysical one, but it ends also in a 
moral one. 

The law of evolution in its later and higher workings 
begins to reveal its reason and meaning. All processes 
are best read and understood in their highest reaches: 
it is the end that interprets and explains all things. 
Science and religion will finally meet in a common truth 
which will fully justify them both. The principle of 



The Beginning 17 

religion is that God is source and cause of all. The 
principle of science, which is wholly evolutional, is that 
all things make themselves, become what they are by 
causes and processes immanent in themselves, and that 
are themselves. One law or method of being and be- 
coming does indeed run through all, and holds or 
obtains from beginning to end; but, in the end, it 
becomes possible, not merely to read the meaning of the 
law, but to discover the reason for its immanence. It 
may take inconceivably long to do so, but in the end 
it grows increasingly clear why and how, with equal 
truth and reason, religion is able to say, on the one 
hand, "Final Cause is principle and cause of all"; and, 
on the other hand, science can assert, "All things come 
of themselves and by laws of their own from which all 
semblance of purpose or final cause must be rigorously 
excluded." 

The solution begins to appear when in the highest 
stage of evolution, involving the higher meaning and 
destiny of man, the antinomy takes such a form, for 
example, as the following: "Only the grace of God, 
through Word and Spirit, can compass the proper 
destination of man"; "Only man himself, by his own 
will and in the exercise of his own freedom, can accom- 
plish his own destiny." How can these apparently 
contradictory propositions be both justified and recon- 
ciled .f^ Yet they are equally necessary truths. All 
along the seemingly beginningless and endless pro- 
cession of evolution there confront each other the 
rival and exclusive claims of transcendent meaning and 
3 



18 The Reason of Life 

purpose, as against immanent independence of extra- 
neous interference. Through and out of the long reign 
of necessity there emerges at last, without miracle, the 
seeming miracle of freedom and personality; and still, 
in higher and higher form, one law runs on through 
all: persons like things must make themselves through 
their own proper reactions upon outward circumstan- 
ces and conditions: creation works through evolution, 
and only fitness survives. 

All transitions from lower to higher — from inor- 
ganic to organic, or from non-life to life, from unreason 
to reason, from necessity to freedom, from natural to 
spiritual — are mysterious and inexplicable to us; but 
there is no occasion to doubt that God's processes of 
creation, natural and spiritual, are continuous and 
unbroken. The unity of the law may be expressed in 
the fact that all things, from atom to man, assume 
their form and become themselves through an imma- 
nent principle of self -adjustment to external conditions: 
the successfully adjusted survive, and the unadjusted 
perish. The fact that in the lower order of things the 
so-called self -adjustment is a mechanical reaction, 
while in the higher activity of persons it is an exercise 
of reason and freedom, is only one of the mysteries of 
evolution which remain unrevealed to us and unex- 
plained by us. We see the reason of the principle that 
"things are made to make themselves," to make or 
mar themselves by acquired fitness or unfitness — only 
there where the reason of things becomes truly apparent 
in its most evolved and highest working, in the des- 



The Beginning 19 

tiny of man to be rational and free and personal. For 
the essence of rationality, freedom, and personality is 
selfhood, and that comes only through the evolution 
of the self through progressive self-action. Man is 
made through being made to make himself. 

We begin in this way to see why the reason of things, 
of creation, of evolution — while in fact it is the Reason 
of God, and so is God — nevertheless needs to be dis- 
tinguished from God. Reason in God comes from 
Itself, and is the principle, the effective beginning and 
constitutive cause of all processes of creation or evolu- 
tion. Reason in the world comes only to itself, in the 
end, and after long processes of evolution. Thus that 
which was for God the beginning, for the world is 
the end: reason in God is eternally complete and per- 
fect; reason in the world is incomplete, imperfect, and 
progressive: it has to make and remake itself through 
deaths and births; to become itself through a thousand 
self-contradictions which have to be survived and over- 
come. There is a deity immanent in the world which 
is God, and yet is not God: which as God cannot be 
thwarted or defeated, and yet which, unlike God, is 
constantly thwarted and defeated, is resisted, grieved, 
quenched in ourselves, blasphemed and contradicted 
in the world without us. It is ^eos, because as the mind 
or the will or the honor of God, it is inseparable from 
Himself and is therefore He; but it is not 6 ^eos, because 
that which is immanent in, and therefore wholly con- 
tained by, the incomplete and imperfect, cannot be 
God who is perfect and complete. The Logos in God 



20 The Reason of Life 

and the logos or reason that is the immanent, ideal, 
formative principle in the world are one and the same; 
and that One, therefore, is capable of being at once 
perfect and first in God, and yet imperfect and last 
in the world, while still God in both. But what may 
be said of God as predicate — as O^os — cannot be said 
of Him as subject — as o ^cos. It is true that the Logos 
is God; it may be true that that which is incomplete 
and imperfect is God : there is that of divine reason and 
meaning and purpose in ourselves which, however 
inchoate and partial, is still God. But it is not true 
even to say that God is the Logos; and of course infi- 
nitely less true to say that He is incomplete or imper- 
fect. If it be still asked. How can the Logos who is 
God be incomplete or imperfect? I answer that He 
is so in the world, as its growing and self-revealing 
reason and meaning and end or purpose; but God's 
reason in and of the world is not other than His Reason 
in and of Himself. These may be diflScult thoughts, 
but they are none the less necessary thoughts: the 
immanence and the transcendence of God are equal 
and correlative necessities of thought. Immanence 
is an absurdity and impossibility in and by itself. 
Reason "coming-to-itself " at the end of a process of 
self-evolution is explicable or possible only as coming 
from Itself at the beginning of the process. The time 
is not quite yet to attempt to explain why not only 
must divine reason pass through human or creature 
unreason in order in it too to fulfil itself, but divine 
right and good must pass through the ordeal of human 



The Beginning 21 

wrong and evil in order to become human as well as 
divine, ours as well as God's. 

It is well to observe how St. John, in the passage 
which furnishes our present text, while ascribing all 
becoming or coming-into-being to the Word of God, 
and incidentally discriminating between the eternal 
dvaK and the temporal yevidOai — yet tacitly describes 
all beginning or origination as a becoming, rather than 
as a new creation. Things are born and grow by an 
immanent law and process of their own; they are not 
made and added or inserted by transcendent act from 
without. The world, as we are being reminded, is not 
a manufacture or mechanism like a watch; it is an 
organic birth and growth like a flower. Things are 
made to make themselves. I repeat that the highest 
working and the fullest reason of the law appears, 
when the highest thing, as man, is made consciously 
and freely to make himseK, and by so knowing and 
having life in himself to become what he is, finite 
spirit and person. The transition is accomplished in 
the appearance of self-consciousness and self deter- 
mination, in the birth of the relatively independent 
and responsible self. 

Thus Reason, Spirit, Life, while eternally with God 
and themselves God, were nevertheless born and made 
to become themselves anew in the time-process of the 
world. Creation, in man as its head, was through the 
world-movement of evolution to return to its Source 
and at-one itself with God in the person of the God- 
man. It is not going too far to say that God, who is 



22 The Reason of Life 

eternally Himself in His transcendence, in His imma- 
nence "comes to" or becomes Himself, in the per- 
fection of His relation to the world, only by the act 
and in the person of Jesus Christ. 

God in the world was prior to and part of the fuller 
truth of God in the flesh: He was in the world as Logos 
before He was born into and lived in humanity as Son. 
Neither of these involved a kenosis in the objectionable 
and impossible sense which has been attached to the 
term. The reason, meaning, or purpose which so 
inchoately and imperfectly is working itself out in the 
slow unfolding of the universe — is none the less God. 
The Sonship which is determining man to and is to 
constitute his destiny — is of God, and is God. The 
Spirit which so incompletely and imperfectly manifests 
itself in and as our spirit — is, for all that, God's Spirit, 
and is God. The Life of God which as our life is so 
weak and poor — is still God's Life, and so is God 
Himself in us. God will not be in us, or in the Church, 
or in the world, any more or otherwise than as we or 
the world will be in Him. Because the whole reason 
and meaning and aim is not so much that He shall 
come to Himself in us, as that He shall do so through 
our coming to ourselves — and so bringing Him to 
Himself — in us. Creation, evolution. Incarnation, civ- 
ilization, human progress, human destiny — are all our 
work as well as God's. It is only as they are ours, that 
we are we: the potentiality, and responsibility, and 
necessity of ourselves becoming and being ourselves 
and making our world, is all that develops us into and 



The Beginning 23 

makes us persons. We could not become ourselves if 
God were not in us, and did not determine us in accord- 
ance with His will and purpose; but if we too did not, 
by our own act and activity, become ourselves — then 
God would not and could not be in us, for there would 
be no "we" or ourselves in which He could be. 



Ill 

THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE 

Where in the process of creation does life begin? 
What is the continuity and connection between its 
lowest and its highest forms or manifestations, between 
life in vegetable or animal and life in man, between 
life in man and life in God? If we are to trace the 
course of life in the world, must we not begin even 
further back than its animal and vegetable forms? 
Creation or evolution, we are told, is ab initio not a 
mechanism but an organism: it was not manufactured 
like a watch but grew as a flower. And the organic is 
living, organism is the product and expression of life. 
What else than life can differentiate its unity into the 
wonderful diversity of organs and functions, and then 
integrate that diversity into a yet more wonderful unity 
again? To say that our universe is an organism, that 
it was not made but grew, is in itself to say that it was 
the product and not the cause of life: life is logically 
and causatively prior to its organs and functions. 

It must be said of the life as was said of the reason of 
the world, that it was in the beginning, and that it was 
the beginning. It was the apx^ causally if not tempo- 
rally, the principle of all becoming and being, of all birth 
and growth in the universe. "In the Logos was life'* 

24 



The Origin and Evolution of Life 25 

— "was," not became, eternally not temporally: life 
belongs to the category of that which was — prior to 
all phenomenal appearing or becoming. And as the 
Logos, so the Life, as St. John also tells us elsewhere, 
"was with God," and was God. 

It is no more to say that all life is God than to say 
that all reason is God. Life in the world does indeed 
begin very low in the scale; but so does reason; all 
evolutional beginnings are the barest potencies and 
promises of what are to be; they wait upon their ends 
to determine and reveal what they are. If life in the 
world is one from beginning to end, and continuous 
through all its stages of growth and change, then it 
must be characterized and defined by what it ultimately 
becomes, not by what it was in the beginning or in the 
course of its becoming. At every human birth we say 
that "a man is born into the world;" but the thing born 
is a man only potentially — and very far from actually, 
if reason and freedom and character are what constitute 
a man. Moreover, life like reason in the world is liable 
to perversion from the proper line of its evolution. 
The possibility of this, of deterioration and degradation 
as well as of normal growth and advance, of sin and 
death instead of holiness and righteousness and life, is 
the condition, the sine qua non, of that relative indepen- 
dence, that both formal and ultimately real freedom 
through which and in which divine reason and life come 
to themselves in the world. To say that reason as such, 
and life as such, are God, is very far from saying that 
all the failures and perversions and contradictions of 



26 The Reason of Life 

these, which the fact of creature freedom renders possi- 
ble, are God also. 

The point is that, whatever the obscurity of its origin, 
the lowliness of its birth, the humiliations of its infancy 
and growth, the perversions, contradictions, and deg- 
radations it has undergone, as a matter of fact life in 
this world has attained the high dignity of manhood, 
and looks forward with assurance to the higher and 
highest attainment and inheritance of Godhead. And 
that which it is to become thus in the end, it was in 
principle and in essence in the beginning. What if in 
its inception, or conception in the womb from which it 
is to be born, the germ of man is indistinguishable from 
that of vegetable or brute — if in the end it is to become 
a man ! Having his entire earthly career in view, we 
characterize and call him from the beginning by his 
highest that is to be; and in a world of universal be- 
coming we see nothing strange in the process by which 
he so gradually and painfully attains to himself. It 
has been with life in the race as it is in the individual: 
if there too it has passed, in the eons, through stages 
no higher than vegetable or animal, what of it — if in 
the end it has become human, and is to become divine ! 
The point, I repeat, is that the life which in the end 
comes to itself in God, in the beginning came from 
Itself in God. 

Life in its highest earthly form, as finite spirit, or 
human personality, is that to which God has given 
birth from Himself, and given to have life in itself. If 
its severance and relative independence, its conscious- 



The Origin and Evolution of Life 27 

ness and possession of itself, its freedom and selfhood, 
have not been instantaneous creations, but very gradual 
evolutions, we may begin to see how and why it could 
not have been otherwise. Finite personality is the end 
and goal of all creation: all evolution is and acts for 
the sake and to the end of it, and may be characterized 
as simply the successive stages and final production of 
it. Only in and through a process of self-being and 
self-acting, rising at last into self-consciousness and 
self-determination, could personality come into exist- 
ence, or be at all. The transition from the immanent 
and physical so-called self-origination of the forces, 
laws, and operations of nature, through the gathering 
reason and meaning of vegetable and animal life, up to 
self-consciousness and freedom in man, we can never 
more than merely trace and chronicle. Description is 
not explanation, and the more scientific observation 
and description resolve the process of cosmic life into 
a continuous evolution from an unknown and unknow- 
able beginning — that is, exclude from their province 
the question of apx^> of initial or causative principle 
and origin — the more are we not only entitled, but 
compelled, to fall back upon the truth that life, like 
reason, is not merely the end and product of the cosmic 
process we call evolution, but was also its antecedent 
principle, its formal and formative cause, its substance 
and subject. All reason is but the reason of Life: that 
is the only reason, the sole meaning and purpose, of all 
that is. The Incarnate Word is the Word of Life. 
Eternal, Encosmic Reason has spoken, has manifested 



28 The Reason of Life 

or expressed itself to us from the beginning — that 
we might see and know and have Life. All evolu- 
tion is the coming of Life: it is the divine process 
by which the Transcendent becomes immanent — 
the Eternal in the temporal, the Infinite in the 
finite, the Perfect in the imperfect, God in the 
world. 

God immanent or encosmic is but the antecedent, 
the earlier stage of God Incarnate. The distinction 
between them is simply that between God in things 
and God in persons — God in things through laws 
made automatic, and God in persons through laws, not 
automatic, but subject in part, and in highest part, to 
the self-conscious and free wills of the persons. God 
in things is, so far as they are concerned, purely imma- 
nent : He is simply the principle and law of their being 
and action. A merely immanent God is indistinguish- 
able from the bare facts of experience and the law of 
evolution. God in persons is immanent also; but He 
is also transcendent. Through the twin miracles of 
consciousness and freedom — which are facts, whatever 
their inexplicability or natural impossibility — God is 
to us not only within but without. His being is without 
us, an objective fact to us; His laws are without us, to 
be known or not, to be reverenced or not, to be obeyed 
or not. We ourselves are not only within but without 
us, as end and purpose to us, to be realized and fulfilled 
or not, to be made or marred by our own acts. Reason 
is without us, to be followed and conformed to, or to 
be disregarded, denied, and darkened; Life itself is an 



The Origin and Evolution of Life 29 

end without us, to be sought and won, or else to be 
despoiled and lost. 

God Incarnate is the divine Logos, the eternal Reason 
and Life, which in creation God would share with the 
manifold not-Himself which He has inscrutably dif- 
ferentiated and separated from Himself, endows with 
selfhood of its own, and gives to have these gifts, of 
reason and life, in itself. At the same time, the reason 
and life which God imparts, by whatever process of 
creature participation, never ceases to be His own and 
Himself: they are always God, though God is always 
more than they — transcendent as well as immanent 
and incarnate. The outward expression of our reason 
or extension of our life, as we have seen, may be de- 
tached from and cease to be ourselves; but wherever 
God's Mind or Life is, no matter how inchoately, it is 
not there without Himself; He is with and in it, and 
it is He. As immanent in His world, as ideal principle, 
beginning and end, first and final cause, rational process 
and evolving life of the world, God to us seems all too 
slowly and painfully and ineffectually to find Himself, 
to " come to " or " become " Himself, in the world. But 
let us remember that God is not in the world to find 
Himself, but to find Himself in the world — and in us, 
through whom alone the world is to find itself through 
finding Him in it. And the length and inefficiency of 
the process — as indeed the process itself — is not in 
Him but in us. God cannot become Himself -in-us in 
a moment, only because we are so infinitely incapable 
of becoming ourselves-in-Him, of being what He is, in 



30 The Reason of Life 

a moment. The process from creature unreason and 
non-life to divine reason and life is one for which all the 
eons are not too long. And there is nothing in the 
constitution, conditions, or operation of all the inter- 
vening eons, that is not fitted and needful to bring the 
creature infinitesimal of immanent reason and life up 
to the fulness of participation in the divine infinitude. 
In coming back again to St. John's few words, so 
full of endless suggestion and implication, let me say 
that I do not pretend to be interpreting them literally. 
I give not the exegesis but the epexegesis, not just what 
the Apostle says or wishes to say or even means by 
what he says, but what I believe to be the postulates 
or presuppositions of what he says. When he says, 
"In Him (the Logos) was life," the principal truth I 
find in the words, or underlying the words, is this: 
Life did not originate as one of the changes, accidents, 
or effects in evolution, but existed before and was the 
subject of evolution. The Apostle, no doubt, was un- 
conscious or ignorant of any law of the eonic grada- 
tions of life, and certainly has not these in his mind. 
He no sooner mentions the general fact of life, as inher- 
ent in the Logos, as the subject matter and principle 
of creation, as the heart and soul of God's self -communi- 
cation in the universe, than he passes instantly to its 
highest manifestation in the life of man. All before 
is only the coming or becoming of that self -knowing, 
self -determining, personal reason and freedom — until 
which life is not yet life indeed, and in which it comes 
to itself in the birth of the finite spirit, or self, or person. 



The Origin and Evolution of Life 31 

Only in self-conscious reason is there that life-in-itself 
to which alone God objectifies Himself, into which He 
may be born from without and from above, and which 
so can become, through itself, child and image of God. 

To know ourselves and in ourselves to know life : to 
have a life of our own wherein we may know what life 
is, and so may know all life and God Himself, who alone 
is Life — this is what is expressed in the words, "and 
the life was the light of men." It is only the eye of 
reason, the eye of man, that can see that light: only 
to him can the injunction come, " Know thyself, and in 
knowing thyself know God." For what is God but the 
Infinite and Eternal of ourselves, and what are our- 
selves, our true and real selves, but the finite image and 
expression of God.^^ We cannot too often or too pro- 
foundly utter the prayer, "Noverim te, D amine ^ nov- 
erim me: noverim me, noverim te!'' 

What is human reason but the faculty or power of 
vision, the eye to see the things that are real but are 
invisible to the eye of sense? Reason in man is that 
by which he apprehends, and more and more compre- 
hends, the reason that is in things — above all, in the 
highest of things, himself. "Right reason" is that to 
which things are what they are, to which nothing 
** seems " other than it is. Right reason is to know God 
as the eternal reason, meaning, and purpose of all things, 
as of ourselves: and so to know God is for us eternal 
life. It is in itself eternal life in us, because it is the 
eternal of ourselves, eternal true and real, eternal right, 
eternal good. 



32 The Reason of Life 

"The life was the light of men:" and it is "a light 
that lighteth every man." The light that is the light 
of all men, potentially lighteth every man — but only 
potentially, not actually, for not every man is lightened. 
Just as the sun is a light for all, but not all see the sun; 
— just as, and yet with a great difference; for the vision 
of sense is mechanical and involuntary, while that of 
reason, and especially that of the moral and spiritual 
reason, is free and depends in the most essential respect 
upon ourselves. 

We say that man — which means all men — is a 
rational being : it is given to him alone in our world of 
experience to see light, to know life: and in fact the 
knowledge of life is the one object, in many forms, and 
from every possible point of view, of human observation, 
investigation, and speculation. The natural scientist, 
the physiologist and psychologist, the social philosopher, 
the moralist, the legislator and statesman, the histo- 
rian, the poet, the prophet, and the priest, are all, in 
their several parts and places, investigators, students, 
interpreters of life. And for all that, "the light 
shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended 
it not." 

Just why and what the darkness — is too deep a sea 
of speculation to embark upon here. The fact of the 
darkness, at every stage and in every aspect of the 
subject of life, life natural, moral, spiritual; darkness 
in the manifold forms of ignorance, error, sin, sorrow, 
death — is too universal and patent to need either 
proof or description. 



The Origin and Evolution of Life 33 

It was never the patient explorer or investigator, 
the laborious and learned historian, the speculative 
philosopher, the practical legislator, or the wise morahst 
— all-important as their several services are — who, 
as such, was the one to see the light eye to eye, to meet 
and know the life face to face, and to bear personal 
witness to it in all the world. It has ever been the 
prophet — Moses returned from his long exile, or come 
down from the mountain top in Arabia, Elijah in the 
desert, or John the Baptist crying in the wilderness of 
Judea. " There came a man from God, whose name was 
John. The same came for witness, that he might bear 
witness of the light, that all men through him might 
believe." What is it in us that apprehends the light, 
that sees and knows the life: that enables us to say 
with Jesus, *' I speak that I do know, and testify that 
which I have seen?" John the Baptist was the chosen 
and typical witness of light and life, because he was 
the representative of that which is the precondition of 
these, that which is the sole efficacious preparation and 
qualification of them — the repentance that has known 
darkness and death, the faith that out of these sees and 
lays hold upon light and life. The repentance and 
faith which John practised and preached, and which was 
embodied in his baptism, contained in germ all the 
truth that was to be realized in its fulness in the death 
and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was no premature 
and impossible anticipation which enabled him even 
then to see in Jesus, the baptized and Baptizer with 
the Holy Ghost, "the Lamb of God that taketh away 
4 



34 The Reason of Life 

the sin of the world." But our interest as yet is 
with the redeeming Person rather than with the 
redemptive Work of Jesus. 

"He (John) was not the Kght, but came that he might 
bear witness of the light. There was the true light, 
even the light that lighteth every man, coming into 
the world." We come thus upon a distinction which 
runs through the entire mind of the New Testament, 
in various modes of expression and illustration. It 
appears here as the distinction between the light that 
lightens, and the light that is lightened, the life that 
quickens and the life quickened. There is mystery 
and apparent paradox in the fact that the distinction 
— and also the reconciliation and identification — of 
these two aspects runs through the person and work of 
Jesus Christ Himself. Unquestionably Jesus Christ 
appears as the baptized as well as the Baptizer with 
the Holy Ghost, the anointed as well as Anointer from 
above. He was in the passive and human sense, as 
well as in the divine and active sense, the regeneration 
and sanctification of humanity — the birth and life of 
man in God. He was indeed humanity in God, and 
recapitulated in His human life the whole true experi- 
ence, history, and destiny of man in his at-one-ment 
and oneness with God. But the distinctive thing in 
Him is, that He was man in God, or humanity in God, 
because He was first God in humanity. 

The difference between the Light that lighteth and 
the light that is lighted, the light in Itself, or in God, 
and the light in us, is never lost sight of. John the 



The Origin and Evolution of Life 35 

Baptist was a burning and a shining "lamp"; he was 
not the Light Itself, of which the lamp is but the recipi- 
ent and vehicle. In Jesus Christ the true light, the 
Light Itself, was coming into the world. This side of 
divine originality and underivedness — at least in rela- 
tion with creation and humanity — is consistently 
preserved in all representations of our Lord. He is 
"The Full," of whose "fulness" we all receive: we are 
His pleroma, " the fulness of Him who filleth all in 
all." He is full of truth and grace; none other is "full," 
but at the most only "filled." If Jesus Christ was 
The Word — although He was so in both senses, yet 
primarily and essentially He was Word Speaking, not 
word spoken, the divine expressing, and not mere 
expression, of humanity. He was in the world before 
He came into it: He who was its beginning, not only 
temporal or initial, but causal and principial, was in 
the world, immanent in it from its beginning; but 
"the world knew Him not." 

Whatever of human origin, human nature and con- 
sequent limitation, human experience, human truth 
and meaning, human identity with ourselves, Jesus 
Christ may have had, and most certainly did have, 
Christianity can never surrender or let go its hold upon 
the conviction, its knowledge, that in the very fullest, 
completest, and most final sense. He was and is "God 
manifest in the fiesh." 



IV 
LIFE ENCOSMIC AND INCARNATE 

I HAVE spoken of all life as one — one from lowest to 
highest, if we are tracing its process in natural evolu- 
tion; from highest to lowest, if we are considering its 
ante-mundane or supernatural source and essential 
nature. I have ventured to describe its phenomenal 
appearance or creature-form in terms of evolution, 
because that is the current science, and because the 
general fact or truth of evolution — with which alone, 
apart from its methods or laws in detail, I presume to 
deal — can scarcely now be questioned. It may be well 
in passing to say, for popular apprehension, that the 
evolution of the highest earthly life from the lowest, 
and through progressive forms or stages of itself, does 
not involve its evolution from or out of other forms 
than its own. The straight upward trunk and summit 
of the tree has not passed through or come out of any 
of the lower branches; so the life that has at last 
culminated in rational, free, and ultimately divine 
humanity, has not come through any of the deflections 
or ramifications of life into other or lower animals than 
men. There is manifest interconnection and interre- 
lation running through all life — as, in the narrower 
field, through all men: "we are all of one blood," which 

36 



Lije Encosmic and Incarnate 37 

means, of one life. But that no more means the descent, 
or ascent, of man from any lower animal, or any other 
than the lower states and stages of himself, than it 
means the descent of the Caucasian from or through 
or out of the African. 

Life begins, evolutionally, to come to itself with the 
coming of the "self," or the birth of reason, whose 
first function is self -consciousness. That may be called 
the ** apprehending (KaraXaySetv) of the light"; life con- 
ceiving itself, conscious of itself, is light; "know thy- 
self," is the law and duty of reason: "Know thyself, 
take possession of thyself, determine, become, be thy- 
self," at once expresses and enjoins the process by 
which selfhood comes into being, by which the life 
becomes the light of men, and man, with the life of God 
so born into conscious, free, personal oneness and fel- 
lowship with him, becomes Son and Image of God, and 
heir of Eternity. 

But neither reason nor, consequently, life is born like 
Pallas, full-formed and full-armed — whether in the 
individual or in the race. It is long true, and still true, 
that "the light that lighteth every man" "shineth in 
the darkness." Potential light is still very far oflf from 
its fulfilment in actual light. That God has endowed us 
by nature with the faculty and capacity for light; that 
He Himself in the world as its life is, as such, its light; 
— does not dispense us from the necessity of coming to 
the light by an act and process of our own. He gives 
us light and life only through our own seeing the light 
and living the life. All rational, moral, spiritual crea- 



38 The Reason of Life 

tion is creation through and by ourselves; God does 
nothing in a Self that is not also the doing of the self. 
That is the condition and law of personality; anything 
done merely upon us, that is not also our own doing, 
that is instead of our own doing, or that saves or spares 
us the doing, is at the cost or expense of us; it dis- 
places and annuls the personality which is the one 
object and aim. So the light shineth in the darkness, 
and will continue to do so imtil we will, and can, and 
do see it for ourselves; until our own spiritual faculties 
and organs are fashioned by use, and our perceptions 
are exercised to apprehend and discern it. I repeat 
that all through that self -becoming of things which we 
call evolution, we can trace the law which only in the 
highest things, ourselves, manifests its reason and 
justifies or explains itself: Life is only for that which 
fits itself to and for life. 

"The light that lighteth every man was (Itself) 
coming into the world." It might be assumed, if we 
go no further than what has been said, that this "com- 
ing into the world" could and would be only an imma- 
nent one: that the coming of the light would be only 
through the evolution of our own faculty of vision and 
power of apprehension. But, on the other hand, there 
is a question which we have first to consider and ponder 
before accepting that conclusion. It is the function 
and task of reason to apprehend, and so far and Jast as 
possible to comprehend, our true ends and ultimate 
destiny. Is it to be claimed or demanded of reason, 
either that it shall have created, or that it shall deter- 



Life Encosmic and Incarnate 39 

mine and accomplish those ends? Can reason do more 
of itself than simply understand and interpret? And 
can it, of itself, understand or interpret anything unto 
completion or perfection? Reason does not either cre- 
ate or determine its objects; it only apprehends them, 
and, in the endless act and process of its own develop- 
ment, more and more comprehends them. 

Reason in man, as I have said, is only the faculty 
and function of perceiving the prior reason that is 
already in things and, above all in this world, in him- 
self — that prior reason which the Scriptures call the 
divine "foreknowledge and predestination," which in 
fact is the Logos or Reason of God. The perfection 
of reason in us is, "to know ourselves even as also we 
are known" of God. But we cannot, from or of our- 
selves, by any immanent process alone, know ourselves 
as God knows us; such knowledge we may receive, but 
cannot produce or originate. "We know not (of 
ourselves) what we shall be" — and yet surely need 
to know it, if we are not merely to be it, but to be it 
ourselves, of our own intelligence, choice, free will, and 
personal act and activity. There can be no self-being, 
or personal existence, at all without an objective, far 
off, future end or goal of being — by foreknowledge, 
desire, will, purpose and pursuit, and gradual attain- 
ment of which, we are to become, find, or make 
ourselves. 

This is yet more, and infinitely more the case, when 
the " all-we-are-to-be " is distinctly not in ourselves, but 
is to come only by union with an Eternal and Infinite, 



40 The Reason of Life 

before, beyond, and without ourselves. How can any 
immanent unfolding of our mere selves attain any such 
transcendent end ? There is a real and divine truth in 
the principle and fact of immanence, but it is only half, 
and the lower half of the truth. All spiritual and 
actual life of men, all personal knowledge of and par- 
ticipation in the Life Itself, begins with transition 
from mere immanence into transcendence. It is not 
until we know God, and the world, and our own life, 
as objective and as objects to ourselves, it is not until 
we have entered into the conscious and free relation 
of distinct and independent persons with all these, that 
religion exists. The bond that constitutes it is not 
the immanent, physical, natural one of the universal 
and necessary inherence, connection, and dependence 
of all things upon God, but the rational, moral, and 
spiritual one of mutual knowledge and understanding, 
mutual love and agreement, mutual good will and 
consentient action between persons, between men and 
God. What I have called the encosmic relation of 
God to the world is properly described as immanent, 
and is subject to the universal and admitted laws of 
immanence, uniformity, necessity, and whatever else. 
But the incarnate relation of God to men is distinctively 
a transcendent one, a relation of either to the other 
from without. The former or encosmic relation under- 
lies our natural constitution and faculties, our congeni- 
tal affinity or congruity with God, our potentiality of 
the divine in ourselves. The relation of incarnation 
is one of spirits — based indeed and conditioned upon 



Life Encosmic and Incarnate 41 

that of natures, but in itself that of persons. The bond 
is one of mutual knowledge, love, will, action, and 
life. 

Without venturing further into such depths, it is 
enough for our present purpose to recall the fact that, 
from the beginning, the Christian consciousness has 
recognized in Jesus Christ, not so much a human testi- 
mony (though this also) to light and life, as rather a 
divine manifestation of the light itself and the life 
itself, the Light and the Life of God. In His person 
it was given to the world, not merely to apprehend the 
light — to know objectively in Him the reason and 
cause and end of itself — but to receive and share the 
life, which is God Himself in us. And to the sin against 
light, its denial, was added the yet greater sin against 
life, in its rejection. Non-apprehension of the truth is 
non-acceptance of the life ; sin of the mind and of the 
will go closely together. 

"But to as many as (through right vision and good 
will) received Him, to them gave He right and title and 
power to become sons of God, even to those who be- 
lieve on His name : who were begotten not of blood, 
nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but 
of God." Before approaching the question of our 
Lord's communication or impartation of the grace and 
life of divine sonship to others than Himself, even to 
all who believe on His name, it will be necessary to 
dwell a little first upon the fact of human sonship as 
realized in Himself. When it is said (Eph. i. 5) that 
"God foreordained, or predestinated, us unto the 



42 The Reason of Life 

adoption as sons unto Himself through Jesus Christ," 
it means that the hfe which came to us from God as 
our father is ultimately to return to Him in our own 
realized and accomplished sonship. The principle and 
subject of evolution as we know it is Life ; the culmi- 
nation of earthly life is in man ; the natural end and 
destination of man is in Christ, in whom we actualize 
or bring to effect our destiny, from the beginning, of 
children of God and partakers personally in the per- 
sonal life of God. 

The Life that was Jesus Christ Himself, as the culmi- 
nation of human destiny in general, had thus an imma- 
nent and evolutional, cosmic and human, derivation. 
Jesus Christ was of the seed of David, of Abraham, of 
Adam : He came in the fulness of time, the heir of its 
spiritual as well as natural accumulation and trans- 
mission. What we claim for Him is, that He was and 
is the true, divine as well as human. Exponent of the 
right reason, Realizer of the accomplished freedom. 
First-begotten of the risen life of the world. Irenseus 
well enough expressed the truth when he said of our 
Lord, longam expositionem hominis in se recapitulat: 
the destiny of man, from its conception in the mind or 
reason of God to its final fulfilment in the life of God, 
is contained and revealed in the story of Jesus Christ. 
That story begins not in time but in eternity, not in 
Adam but in God. But it is the story none the less of 
Adam also, of humanity from beginning to end of its 
true evolution. Jesus Christ is the Way of Man, from 
Adam up to God : as much the natural as the super- 



Life Encosmic and Incarnate 43 

natural way, the proper end of nature as the predes- 
tined end of God. 

It is absolutely necessary therefore to construe the 
human sonship of Jesus in human terms. The prior, 
prehuman Sonship of Himself alone is the presupposi- 
tion and precondition of the sonship realized in His 
humanity, but it is the human sonship alone of which 
He is for us the author and exponent, the only sonship 
which we can receive from Him and share with Him. 
It is that therefore of which He is the Way to us, and 
which it more nearly and immediately concerns us to 
learn from Him. 

Nevertheless, Christianity can never see in Jesus 
Christ only the human surmise and suggestion, and 
not also the divine fulfilment of human life. He can 
never be to us only the human interrogation and not 
also the divine reply, the full answer to all we want of 
God. All our want is summed up in the single word 
Life, and this is the record in reply: "God hath given 
us life, and this life is in His Son : he that hath the Son 
hath the life." Our Lord is come for the express 
purpose "that we might have life." To say then that 
"the Christ" of our religious conception is only a 
human ideal, the personification of our own idea or 
sentiment or desire or hope of divine life, and that the 
historic Jesus was but the highest personal exemplar 
and expression of that ideal, who has therefore given 
His name to it — not only falls short of the truth, but 
directly reverses it. The idea embodied and expressed 
to us in the Christ is distinctly the difference and dis- 



44 The Reason of Life 

crimination between truth merely conceived and truth 
reahz/ed and existent. It is not a Christ in the mind 
that is our reUgion, but the Christ actual in the flesh. 
The gist and point of our Christianity is that the 
Christ, all that is contained in the concept or that is 
expressed in the term, all of God in man and man in 
God, all of Life Eternal for us and in us — "was mani- 
fest in the flesh," was incarnate in Jesus. The spirit 
that denied that Jesus Christ was "come in the flesh," 
was to St. John the spirit of Antichrist. The " newness" 
of old truths, old ideas, sentiments, and conceptions, 
"in Jesus," was that in Him they were "come," were 
passed into act and actuality. We believe that Jesus 
was the end of an evolutional process — but what was 
that end? It was not only the mind but the life of 
God in the world, "come to Itself" in Him. He was 
the End and Heir of the world, inasmuch as He was its 
reason revealed, its meaning interpreted, its purpose 
accomplished. But in saying this, let us remember 
that the Christ is still only in process: Jesus is coming 
still, and yet to come. The Body of His incarnation 
was not alone His flesh, but all flesh. Jesus was not 
only Man, but all men. 

The life, then, which Jesus Christ brought into our 
humanity, the divine sonship with which He invested 
it, was the natural destination, which is one with the 
divine predestination, of humanity itself. Humanity 
comes to its end first in Him: He is its Fulfiler and 
its Fulfilment: the Author and Revealer, not only of 
the fact that, but no less of the act or process by 



Life Encosmic and Incarnate 45 

which, humanity is born of God and enters into the 
life of God. For divine sonship and Ufe have just 
as much to be the act and attainment of humanity 
in God, as they are the gift and operation of God in 
humanity. 

"As many as receive" Jesus Christ, through faith in 
His name, through apprehension of what He is to 
them, see themselves in Him, and Him in themselves. 
In Him they "know themselves even as also they are 
known," as God knows them; and "apprehend that 
for which also they are apprehended of God in Christ 
Jesus." In Him they find "authority," right and 
title, grace and power, to "become sons of God." In 
Him they see themselves entered into their divine 
inheritance, as heirs and possessors of the Kingdom of 
God, and as actual partakers of Eternal Life. Why 
and how does our Incarnate Lord constitute and confer 
the right and title by which we become sons of God? 
Because — first in Himself for us, and then by Himself 
in us — He is the Author and the fulfilment of the con- 
dition upon which, and is Himself the mean or means 
through which alone we can be sons of God; and 
moreover is then the matter and substance of our 
sonship ^by His own continued presence and life 
in us. 

The process by which we share the sonship and life 
of Jesus Christ, the rationale of our own begetting and 
birth and life of God, is described in the words, "which 
were begotten, or born, not of blood, nor of the will of 
the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." Just as 



46 The Reason of Life 

Jesus Christ was Himself, in the flesh, no mere offspring 
of man and woman, but Son of God and Humanity, so 
that holy thing that is born in us through Him is no 
mere innate or immanent birth of, or out of, ourselves; 
but is a life begotten and born from without, and 
from above. As the true and inevitable designation 
of the higher nature of Christ in the flesh, or of Jesus, 
is Incarnate Godhead, so His lower nature and life, 
which we share with Him, cannot be otherwise con- 
ceived or expressed than as Humanity Regenerate. 
The life of God in man cannot manifest itself otherwise 
than as a new life of man in God. Regeneration is the 
fact and theme of the New Testament. 

The seed, the soil, and the fruit produced; the 
sperma, the womb, and the life that is born of it, are 
constant figures of vital spiritual facts and events. In 
the operations described under these figures, the soil 
or womb is always upon earth — the more or less sus- 
ceptible, receptive, responsive nature or heart of man, 
made for God, for the addition to it, the reception in 
it, the union with it, of life from without and from 
above. Always the sperma or seed is "the Word,'* 
that which eternally is with God and is God, that of 
God which is communicable, which the world may 
share with Him, and which constitutes its measure of 
the divinity that informs and shapes all that is not 
God. The Word is in all that is, but is the light of 
man, to whom alone it utters and would reveal Itself. 
The Word of God, which is the divine counterpart and 
object of man's own innate reason, the truth and mean- 



Life Encosmic and Incarnate 47 

ing of all things and chiefly of himself, to know Whom 
is his life, and to serve Whom his freedom — that 
eternal Word needed not alone to speak to us in all 
things, but more especially to "come " to us and "man- 
ifest" Himself among and in us. To know God in 
things, by natural reason and by inference from nature 
and from ourselves, furnishes no doubt a valid basis 
for natural religion. But to know God in Person, 
that is to say, in Himself and all of Himself that is 
revealable and communicable, in that perfect Self- 
revelation of Him which is most completely His Word 
to us, and that Self-impartation of Him which is His 
Son in us — that is religion of another sort and in an 
infinitely truer and more real sense. 

As it is always the Word, which is the Seed, that is 
revealed or communicated, that is conceived and born 
in us — so always it is the Spirit by which it is con- 
ceived and born and lives in us. The Word is the 
divine principle of objective communication to us; 
the Spirit is the equally divine principle of subjective 
appropriation by us. 

The seed assumes the soil; it is correlative with it: 
they are mutually related and adapted the one to the 
other, and neither has function or existence, as such, 
apart from the other. That which is to be born of 
them is joint product of seed and soil. So when our 
Lord entered into our nature through the womb of the 
Virgin, the seed was of God, but the soil or womb was 
man. And so He who was born was equally Son of 
God and Son of Man; the eternal Mind and Life of 



48 The Reason of Life 

God in the world comes to Himself through the process 
of nature and of man. 

But the Spirit is not merely the natural affinity of 
the human with the divine, man's constitutional po- 
tentiality and need for God. It is not wholly man's 
instinct for God; rather is the Spirit of God Himself 
attracting and drawing us to Him through that natural 
affinity and need. Our Lord expresses the full truth 
when He says, *'No man can come to me, except the 
Father that sent me draw him." Just as the Word 
was in the world before His incarnation in Jesus Christ, 
so the Spirit was in the world before His descent from 
the risen and ascended Lord of Life. But the Spirit 
after is as much more than the Spirit before, as the 
Word become Flesh in Jesus is more than the Word 
that from the beginning was revealed "through the 
things that are made! " It is always true that the 
Spirit "proceedeth from the Father and the Son" — 
or from the Father through the Son. 

It is doubtless true that there is a premonition of 
spirit even in inanimate things, in the attractions 
of matter and the affinities of substances; still more, 
of course, in the natural affections and domestic rela- 
tions that bind animal life together. But as reason is 
reason only when it comes to know, and possess, and 
determine itself as in man — so love is truly love, and 
spirit is fully spirit, only in personality, and in the 
unity of personal relations. Spirit answers to Spirit 
only through rational intelligence and understanding, 
through aflFection and love, through mutual will and 



Life Encosmic and Incarnate 49 

consent, through unity and harmony of action, conduct, 
character, Ufe. Father and Son are One only in the 
unity of Spirit, and Spirit exists only in such a unity 
of Persons. The Holy Ghost is the divine perfection 
of Mutual Knowledge and Love. 

As the Holy Ghost is the unity in Heaven of Father 
and Son : is the divine harmony in the universe between 
God tranjscendent and God immanent, God in Himself 
and God in all else: — so on earth is He the bond 
between God and us, that bond revealed, consummated, 
assured to us in Jesus Christ. We want not the 
human idea or ideal only of that bond, but the divine 
actual and real: something that faith makes visible, 
that hope makes present, and that love begins already 
to know, possess, and enjoy. 

Why is it less rational to worship God incarnate in 
a Person than immanent in a thing we call Nature? 
Where is He most, or is He most Himself, and therefore 
most worthy of our worship? He is indeed in nature 
and in all its processes — but assuredly there most, 
where nature has come to its consummation in Himself, 
and where He stands revealed and manifested in Jesus 
Christ. I can doubt, I can at times disbelieve, God 
anywhere, everywhere, except in Jesus Christ. 



V 
THE GLORY OF THE ONLY BEGOTTEN 

"The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. And 
we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from 
the Father." What was the peculiar glory of Jesus 
Christ, the significance of that complete impression 
which He has left permanently upon the eye and mind 
and life of all who know Him, and know themselves 
in Him.f^ Within the thought of the New Testament 
there is room for at least three aspects or applications 
of the term "glory" as used in connection with our 
Lord. There is first the eternal and divine glory which 
belongs to Him as the Logos who in the timeless "be- 
ginning" was with God and was God. In the proper 
and perfect sense of the term, the Logos of God is the 
principle of all divine Self-utterance or impartation: 
it is that of Himself which is in all that proceeds from 
Him. The divine that is in the world and in ourselves, 
is not in the fullest sense God; it is what, speaking in 
terms of ourselves, we would call God's Word, or 
Will — which must certainly, to save us from pan- 
theism or from an objectionable monism, be just as 
clearly distinguished from God's Self as it must no less 
be identified with Him. It is in this sense that the 
Epistle to the Hebrews describes our Lord in His eter- 

50 



The Glory of the Only Begotten 51 

nity as at once the "Express" of the Divine glory, and 
the " Impress " of the Divine substance or essence. He 
is the Mean or Medium of God's expression and im- 
pression in or upon all else than Himself. So through 
Him all things were created and are upheld: He is not 
a Being distinct from God, although within God His 
being is distinguished from the Father who is the sole 
source of all being. 

The Logos of Creation as a whole is specifically the 
logos of each detail of creation, and most manifestly 
so of its higher and highest details. So, in the second 
place, as Logos of man, the glory of our Lord is that 
of the "Man from Heaven," man as from all eternity 
in the mind and purpose of God. In God foreknowl- 
edge and predestination are inseparable: the end was 
in the beginning: final cause was first cause. Jesus 
Christ was Alpha as well as Omega, from and through 
Whom, as well as for and to Whom, all things were 
created. Man in Him was first, as he is last in creation 
as we know it, beginning and end of all evolution, heir 
of all things and predestined head of the world that is 
to be. When the seer or prophet in John the Baptist 
recognized in Jesus the ^rpiDTos /xov, he embodied in his 
person the witness of humanity to its divine proto- 
type. Jesus Christ was before David, before Moses, 
before Abraham, before Adam, before the foundation 
of the earth. 

But thirdly and chiefly, as concerns ourselves, the 
glory of Jesus, or of the Word made Flesh, was the 
glory of the deity realized by Him in our humanity. 



52 The Reason of Life 

the true divinity of His perfected manhood. That 
was a glory, not brought down with Him from heaven 
as God, but wrought out by Him on earth as man — 
and then taken up with Him into heaven. Of course 
the two cannot be severed, any more than the stream 
from its source: "No man hath ascended into heaven, 
but he that descended out of heaven, even the Son of 
man, which is in heaven." But the true glory of the 
Son of Man, as divine representative of men, is, in this 
connection, not so much that which entered into Him 
as endowment as that which is accomplished by Him as 
human acquirement and attainment. It was with 
Him as it is with us — not so much what we have 
received, as what we have ourselves done with it and 
made out of it: "Herein is my Father glorified: that 
ye bear much fruit." 

But yet more definitely, what was the exact glory 
which the eyes of the two Johns beheld and bare witness 
to, that we all through them should believe? It was 
"the glory as of an only-begotten from a father." What 
they saw in Jesus Christ was God Himself reproduced 
in our humanity — man reborn and remade in that 
only possible personal and real image of God, the Son 
in whom Himself is repeated. Sonship is the only 
proper utterance and expression of fatherhood, and 
the whole truth of man created in the image of God 
finds fulfilment only in the consummation of God's 
predestination of him unto sonship through Jesus 
Christ unto Himself. 

There is a yet further propriety which we may dis- 



The Glory of the Only Begotten 53 

cover in the interchangeableness and almost identity 
of the two terms Logos and Son as apphed to our Lord. 
Not only is son the natural and true correlative and 
self -utterance of father, but Father, and not Maker or 
Lord or any lower term, can alone express the actual 
relation of God to the all-else that proceeds from Him. 
Just as we say, that not Eternity, nor Wisdom, nor 
Power, nor anything else, but only Love can truly 
express what God Himself is — Love, which gives of 
itself in others, in order that it may give more of itself 
to others. 

There is a propriety in viewing and designating 
Creation as a whole as Son of God, inasmuch as it is 
all One, and, as it came from, so it is destined to return 
to Him in the final inheritance of sonship. "The 
earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the 
revealing of the sons of God," and will find in them 
the meaning and interpretation of itself. 

But it is not so much as eternal and essential Logos 
of God, nor yet as Logos of creation as a whole, as 
when we view our incarnate Lord as Logos, divine 
definition and revelation, of man, that we see its full 
and necessary interpretation in sonship. The glory of 
the Only -begotten is the realization and revelation of 
the end of evolution in the deification of humanity. 
The crowning glory of Jesus Christ was not that which 
He had with the Father before the world was; nor 
yet that which He brought with Him into the world 
when He came forth from the Father; it was 
that which He wrought as man in the world, the 



54 The Reason of Life 

act and achievement by which He made humanity 
divine. 

This brings us to enquire into the meaning of certain 
expressions which we much use and very Httle construe 
to ourselves. How much and what has Jesus Christ 
taught or revealed to us of God — what, and how? 
"No man hath seen God at any time; the Only- 
begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He 
hath declared Him." Declared Him in words? de- 
fined Him in terms, and propositions, and syllogisms? 
"Jesus saith, I am the Way, and the Truth, and the 
Life; no one cometh to the Father but by me." The 
way to the Father, the truth of the Father, the life of 
the Father — they are all He, not merely His teaching 
or declaration. "If ye had known Me, ye would have 
known my Father also: from henceforth ye know Him, 
and have seen Him." "How sayest thou. Show us 
the Father? He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father." "He hath declared Him," — in the word we 
have translated "declare" is there not something more 
than mere declaration: "expounded, interpreted, or 
expressed Him"? God is elsewhere described as He 
"whom no one hath seen, or can see." He is visible 
only in whatsoever manifests Him, or manifests what 
He is: as when St. John says elsewhere, "No man hath 
beheld God at any time; if we love, God abideth in 
us; because God is Love," and love is God. 

All this brings us back to the truth that, as in Jesus 
Christ the Father is revealed in the Son, and only in 
the Son, so in general, and essentially, fatherhood is 



The Glory of the Only Begotten 55 

known, or revealed, or indeed exists, in and only in 
sonship. The whole truth of Christianity is realized 
and expressed in the fact of the fatherhood of God as 
manifested in the sonship of Jesus Christ : for what is 
true of Him in His humanity, is made true for humanity 
in Him. As in Jesus Christ the Father was revealed 
or declared in the act and fact of His perfectly 
accomplished Sonship, so in us too God is seen, or is 
known, or (so far as we are concerned) is, only in 
the sonship in ourselves which constitutes Him our 
Father. 

In response then to the question, what of God we 
see and know in Jesus Christ, I answer: All of God that 
is communicable to us, or receivable by us. That is 
the same as to say that Jesus Christ is the consum- 
mated fulness of the relation between God and us. 
In Him, God is in a sense become our Father, through 
our becoming sons or children of God in Him. He has 
brought us into that consummated relation of children 
to God in which God is no longer only potentially but 
now actually our Father. Of course potentially and 
causally fatherhood is prior to sonship, but actually 
and effectually it is realized only in sonship: if the 
former is cause of the latter, at any rate it is effected 
only in and through the latter. 

However it may have been the nature and the natural 
destiny of man to become son of God, let it not be 
imagined that he could have become so by a mere imma- 
nent process of natural evolution, that is, by the opera- 
tion of laws and forces wholly within himself. It is 



56 The Reason of Life 

the nature and destiny of an acorn to become an oak; 
not, however, by causes and activities altogether within 
itself, but only in reaction and cooperation with agents 
outside itself. And the oak is the result and expression, 
not of the acorn alone, but no less of all the influences 
and agencies that conspired to produce it. If we so 
readily recognize reaction and interaction with environ- 
ment in natural things, why not equally expect and 
look for it in spiritual things? "Word" and "Spirit" 
most simply and exactly express media of relation and 
reaction between us and God, out of or apart from 
which we can as little become all ourselves as the seed 
can apart from sun and soil. 

That "God predestined us to sonship through Jesus 
Christ unto Himself," means that only through rela- 
tions and communications of Word and Spirit from 
and with Himself could we attain unto the destiny 
which is none the less our natural end because it is our 
supernatural destination. That God eternally predeter- 
mined us means that He actually and in time determines 
us to sonship; and the question of practical interest is, 
How does He do so? And more particularly, How does 
He do so through Jesus Christ? In the choice of such 
words themselves as "Word" and "Spirit," we have 
something of definition and description — as on the 
one hand, of the divine agents and agencies, so equally 
on the other, of the human operations proceeding from 
them. " Word " is not only the expression of and from 
reason, intelligence, understanding, but equally the 
expression to these. If Jesus Christ is God's Word to 



The Glory of the Only Begotten 57 

us, and it is through Jesus Christ that God determines 
us to sonship, it follows that God calls us to sonship 
primarily through divine appeal to, and human response 
of, our own reason, intelligence, and understanding. 
Only we ourselves can be sons, in the full sense; we 
cannot be made so otherwise than as we make ourselves. 
God makes us only potentially sons; that is, not only 
endows us with natures and faculties to become so, 
but brings us into the gracious relation of sons. To be 
sons, however, actually, or to be so in ourselves, must 
be of ourselves. Otherwise we are not sons indeed; 
for sonship, in the truer sense of it, is not a merely 
natural or objective relation, but a subjective and 
personal one. The appeal of Jesus Christ to us, 
or of God to us in Christ, is the most immediate 
and direct possible, because it is not only the 
appeal to our whole nature, but the call to our 
completest and most perfect selves. But it cannot be 
to us more than an appeal and a call; God can fulfil 
Himself in us only in us — that is to say, in what we 
ourselves are. "Our wills (ourselves) are ours, we 
know not how; our wills are ours, to make them Thine 
(God's)." That "making ourselves God's'' is what 
alone makes us, not only persons, but spiritual per- 
sons, children of God. 

But God appeals not alone to our intelligence, to our 
knowledge and understanding of ourselves and of Him. 
He appeals yet more strongly to our affections: feeling, 
affection, will and disposition, as well as reason — all 
that constitutes and characterizes us — is what He 



58 The Reason of Life 

wants, and what He speaks to by His Word, through 
His Spirit, in Jesus Christ. 

The Word, which is Jesus Christ, is Life objectively 
revealed. The Spirit, which is the Holy Ghost, is life 
subjectively received and shared. Both divine revela- 
tion and human appropriation or reception are essen- 
tially transcendent acts and not immanent processes. 
Religion in all its parts is a matter between us as with- 
out God, and God as without us — though a "without" 
in both cases to be converted into a " within." Religion 
is essentially an " at-one-ment " out of a previous 
"at-two-ness." It is no mere subjective play or process 
of a divinity wholly within us, a divinity of our own. 
God in endowing us with reason and with freedom, 
has given us the power of objectifying Life to ourselves, 
and so making it both a light and a law to us from with- 
out. Rather, and more truly, I should say, He has 
given us the power of seeing Life objectively, in Him 
and in All as well as in ourselves : and so seeing it as 
what it really is, a light and a Jaw to all who have eyes 
to see and wills to obey. Life thus becomes to us, not 
merely an immanent fact, but a transcendent act on 
our part. It is something from without and above us 
which we must know in order to attain, and attain in 
order truly to know. That is to say, we need to know 
it as something without and beyond us before we can 
know it as something from without within us. God's 
part is (1) by His Word, and (2) by His Spirit; our part 
is (1) faith in response to the Word, and (2) works 
or life in obedience to and fulfilment of the Spirit. 



The Glory of the Only Begotten 59 

It is not too much to say that it is not possible to 
know God except in Trinity, — not a trinity of specu- 
lative and metaphysical thought, but the actual and 
practical Trinity, in which God has made Himself 
knowable and known to us — without us by His Word, 
and within us through His Spirit. I might add in fur- 
ther explication or analogy that our relation to ourselves 
and to the world around us is no longer, as with beings 
below us, a merely immanent one, but distinctly also 
a transcendent one. We see and know and determine 
ourselves from without, and are not only determined 
by ourselves from within. The Self in us, or personal- 
ity, comes from and consists in the reason and freedom 
which are distinctively acts and activities of transcen- 
dent vision and direction. We have a relative indepen- 
dence, not only of God and the world, but even of 
ourselves, quite suiBEicient to enable us eternally to make 
or mar ourselves. 

As little are we in any merely immanent relation with 
the world around us. We are in it and of it, and yet 
are also without it and can be above it. The fact that 
we know it, and that we can in a thousand ways, right 
or wrong, wise or unwise, conform ourselves with it or 
not, constitutes for us a relative independence of it 
that is not only a fact, but the distinctive and character- 
istic fact with regard to ourselves and our position in 
the world. 

And this fact of facts extends no less, as we have 
seen, to our relation with God Himself. Just the 
essential truth of religion is, that God is not merely 



60 The Reason of Life 

immanent in us or we in Him, but that He is transcen- 
dent. The immanence exists, and so far as the world 
is concerned, exists sole and alone up to the moment in 
which reason and freedom are born into it. But so 
soon as these appear, as we come to know ourselves, 
the world, and God, and know them, not merely as 
objects of knowledge, but as objects of personal relation 
and obligation — that moment our relation to them 
becomes transcendent, and ethics and religion become 
possible and necessary. There only remains then the 
relation and distinction between ethics and religion; 
and that may be given in a brief discussion of the word 
which just here looms most into prominence: *'The 
Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace." 
"Of His fulness we all received, and grace for grace. 
For the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came 
by Jesus Christ." Grace is communicated Life — 
life imparted from without through our organs of 
spiritual reception and appropriation and assimilation. 
It is the life of God made or become our life, through 
faith, hope, and love. The life of God, as presented 
to us for these, and through these, is the person of 
Jesus Christ. 

We may turn again to observe how, in the Scriptures, 
all life is treated as One; and one origin and account 
is given of it in all its stages. The Word of God is 
everywhere the source and cause of all being: '*In It, 
or in Him, was life." That was its universal and abso- 
lute beginning, outside of God Himself. This, as I 
have said, need not mean temporal beginning; it may 



The Glory of the Only Begotten 61 

be simply causal beginning, or principle. How did it 
become, not merely life, but rational life? The life 
became the light of man, with the birth of reason : that 
is to say, as the Word of God immanent in the world, 
and highest in humanity, developed for itself a faculty 
and a vision, became visible to itself in the mind of 
man, God passed for him from immanent into tran- 
cendent and objective: man began to know God outside 
himself, and himself outside of God. Then entered 
the Law, of which Moses was the culminating repre- 
sentative and symbol. God is not simply and neces- 
sarily, de facto, in man and man in God, as would be 
the case if their relation were only an immanent one. 
Quite another thing — God ought to be in man and 
man in God: the " ought " referring altogether to the 
free choice and reception of men, and having neither 
place nor meaning apart from these. The relation, 
in other words, has become transcendent and objective, 
personal and ethical. 

The One and the Same Word of God that was life 
in the world even before reason appeared; that was 
reason and law in the world of men to whom life was 
become light — that same Divine Word had yet a 
higher manifestation and communication of Himself 
to make to " men of good will." 



VI 

GRACE TO BECOME SONS 

The love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
the fellowship of the Holy Ghost! — it is not too much 
to say that, expressed in terms of their essential natures 
and functions, God is Love, Jesus Christ is Grace, the 
Holy Ghost is Fellowship. In these three terms we 
have all the divine constituents in human life: that is 
to say, we have the full expression and description of 
what God is in His relation to our own personal life. 
In what fulness and exactness of meaning do we say 
that God is our life — not natural now, but spiritual 
and personal? The life of God, as distinguished from 
His mere being or metaphysical nature — what we 
venture to call His personal life — is best and fully 
expressed in terms, or under the specific designation, 
of that which is not only His most characteristic activ- 
ity, but is the spirit and principle of all His activities. 
There is only one word that really defines or expresses 
God; all others applied to Him are only formal, not 
real designations of Him. To say, for example, that 
God is truth, is only to say that God is " that which 
is "; it does not say What He is. To say that God 
is righteousness, is only to say that He is right, that 
He is that to which we are under obligation; it does 

62 



Grace to Become Sons 63 

not tell what right or righteousness is, and conse- 
quently what He is. We only tell essentially and 
really what God is, when we say that God is Love, 
or Goodness; these are the only terms which have a 
real and determinate content. Love is the willing of 
Good; and the willing of good is Goodness. 

Now there is no question as to what Good is; every 
being's nature absolutely determines and defines its 
good: its good is the fulfilment and satisfaction of its 
nature. The one real good that, in the whole realm of 
possibility or actuality, we can know, or possess, or 
enjoy, is Life in its fulness and its freedom. We know 
therefore precisely what Good is, and what Goodness, 
or the will of the good, is. The only other good than 
life itself is whatsoever truly ministers to life. Meta- 
physics tells us that there is no other motive or end of 
desire or of action than either the perfection or the 
blessedness of life: and that these two things are so 
exactly coincident as to be practically identical. Good 
is Life, or whatsoever ministers to life. 

Love or Goodness is willing good to others — willing 
to all others the good which we first know, possess, and 
enjoy in ourselves. It is the desire and disposition to 
share with others the good which is our own life and 
our own selves. When Jesus Christ speaks of "giving 
His life for many," the word used does not mean 
literal or merely bodily life, it means His soul. His very 
Self. The love and goodness of God has but one mean- 
ing and one purpose in the world of His creation. He 
has given to all things to have life; He has given to 



64 The Reason of Life 

man to know, and personally to live, life; He has 
given us in Christ all the fulness and all the blessedness 
of the Life which is Himself, and which He has con- 
stituted us, and now enables us, to know, to possess, 
and to enjoy. 

God is Love; and, next, Jesus Christ is Grace. Grace 
is love applied, love in operation or in effect. You look 
for love in the subject of it — in this case, in God; 
you look for grace in the object of it, in man. Grace 
is God Self-communicated, Life Self-imparted, Good 
and Goodness shared and reproduced. In Jesus Christ 
God has not given us somewhat from Him, He has 
given us His life. Himself. 

Incarnation is something vastly more than imma- 
nence; but the difference is not so much in God and 
His part in it, as in us and our relation to it. God is 
so much more in us than in the clod, only because we 
have become so much more than the clod. The full 
half of the Gospel as the "power of God unto salva- 
tion," is not in the coming of God to us in and by His 
Word, but in the bringing us to Him by His Spirit. 
Fellowship with God, sharing His spirit. His nature, 
His life. Himself, His goodness and His good. His 
perfection and His blessedness, is the sum and the 
substance of Christianity. It is all that God has to 
give or we to receive. But the doubt or diflSculty in 
the matter of the divine fellowship is all on our side. 
It was easier for the Word aptare Deum homini — even 
through descent to the Cross — than it is for the 
Spirit aptare hominem Deo. Nevertheless God, and 



Grace to Become Sons 65 

His life, and His good, can be ours only through that 
fitting of ourselves to Him, only as we do actually 
receive and share Him. 

Therefore I say that it is only from God the Father, 
through God the Son and by God the Holy Ghost, 
that we can so have and know God as to be partakers 
of Eternal Life. We know God only in Jesus Christ 
and in ourselves: that is to say, we know Him only 
by His Word to us, as the principle and medium of His 
objective Self -revelation and communication; and by 
His Spirit within us, as the principle of our own sub- 
jective reception and appropriation. Thu3 the whole 
matter of Life from God and life in us is expressed in 
the single comprehensive term Grace. 

Grace, which is thus almost the distinctive term of 
the New Testament, is used (1) to express an eternal 
and essential disposition of God. Grace was in the 
world before the Law came: it is older than Moses. 
It is older than Faith, and was before Abraham. It 
is older than Adam, or Man: it was in the nature, in 
the heart and mind of God before the world was. All 
appearances and all facts to the contrary notwithstand- 
ing, the beginning and the end of the world is an act 
of grace. God created not only by and from but for 
Himself: the end, which is always before the beginning 
in rational creation, was and is for divine Self -communi- 
cation, Self-impartation. God creates only that He 
may bless; the only sense in which it is true that He 
created for his own glory is, that His glory is His love. 
His grace. His divine sympathy and fellowship with 



66 The Reason of Life 

His creation. It is true, first and most, in God himself, 
that blessedness finds itself in giving rather than in 
receiving. He created in order that He might have 
whereto to give, wherein to impart. Himself: the end 
of creation is God in His creation. 

If it be asked, how we know this initial and ultimate 
truth of God — the answer is easy. In the first place, 
it is written in ourselves, who are not only the creatures, 
but the children and image of God. The world finds 
its intention preeminently in us, and that intention 
becomes ever more and more plain as we learn better 
to know ourselves, and in knowing ourselves know 
God. The world foresees that, what it is coming to as 
the true end and law of its being, is the truth that life 
and blessedness, with us as with God, and with God as 
with us, are in giving rather than in receiving, and that 
the more that principle and spirit and law prevail, the 
more we fulfil ourselves, and the nearer we draw to 
God. The true nature and law of things are what they 
are coming to, and not what they already are. That 
love, service, and sacrifice are life, and that hate, 
selfishness, and oppression are death, Christianity has 
already made a commonplace of thought and speech; 
when it has made it a commonplace of conduct, 
character, and life, it will have come to its own. 

In the second place, the truth of God and man we 
are insisting upon is just that which was revealed and 
given to the world in Jesus Christ. The light was 
always in the world, but it shone in the darkness, and 
the darkness comprehended it not. The simple fact 



Grace to Become Sons 67 

that the Son of Man, He who came to reveal to man 
the truth that was in him, and the truth that is God, 
came not to be served, but to serve — to be servant of 
all, and to give His life. His soul, Himself, in behalf of 
all — that simple fact teaches at once what God is, 
and what man is. 

Grace then is primarily the eternal nature and pre- 
destination of God. If it is asked, what there is in it 
in Him which distinguishes it from simply Love, we 
answer that, from the first, it is love, if not expressed 
in, yet at least with the purpose of, action, love that 
means and looks forward to self -bestowal. All that 
goes before that ultimate participation in God which is 
the destiny of creation, is the evolution of being or 
beings capable of participating in Him. That this 
capacity should come through eons of preparation, 
and that this preparation should be through eons of 
poverty, pain, and toil; that the earnest expectation 
of the creation should have so long to wait for the 
manifestation, or revealing, of the sons of God; that 
it should so groan and travail in pain, while it longs and 
hopes for deliverance from the bondage of corruption 
into the liberty of the glory of the children of God — 
does not contradict the truth that the meaning of it all 
is fruition, possession, and blessedness in the end. 
That life in the world should have had to undergo the 
pangs of birth in the acquisition of reason, self-knowl- 
edge, and freedom; that it should have to endure the 
discipline, the hard demands, and the penalties of law; 
that it should have to learn to know and achieve free- 



68 The Reason of Life 

dom through bondage, hoUness through sin, and life 
through death — all this is not without a reason into 
which we may ourselves begin to penetrate. All things 
are subject to the law and necessity of making and 
becoming themselves, just because the One thing up to 
which they are all moving, and for which they all are. 
Selfhood and Sonship, reception and reproduction of 
the life and likeness of God, can only thus, through 
the long and painful process of self-becoming, become 
at all. "Ourselves also, which have the first-fruits of 
the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, 
waiting for our adoption, the redemption of our 
body." 

But (2) Grace as a divine act as well as disposition 
becomes the special function of that (for lack of a 
better term of differentiation in the being and activi- 
ties of God) Person of the Godhead, through Whom 
are mediated all God's operations in creation, and who 
is known primarily as the Word of God. It has been 
intimated that all created being, simply as such, is an 
act of grace, inasmuch as it is, so far as it is its nature 
and law to go, self-communication on God's part. 
Grace becomes more and more, as receptivity and 
recipient become more — until, capacity and faculty 
for sonship prepared and provided, Sonship from God 
comes to fill and satisfy it, by incarnation in it. 

Incarnation was no after-thought of God, nor after- 
need of man. It was part — and highest, therefore 
latest, part — of the process of creation or evolution, 
which is one from beginning to end, and whose end 



Grace to Become Sons 69 

was already in, and even before, its beginning. Let it 
be remembered that, in speaking of beginning, I 
always mean logical and causal, and not necessarily 
temporal-beginning. Creation has its reason, its mean- 
ing, its interpretation and fulfilment in Jesus Christ, 
in whom at last God is wholly in it, as it is wholly in 
God. But God is in it with a distinction and a differ- 
ence between His modes of presence in it first and last. 
He is in it in Jesus Christ, not by immanence of nature, 
but, in transcendence of nature, by operation in it of 
Word and Spirit — which, while also He, are never- 
theless to be properly distinguished from Him. 

Grace (3), always in the World, comes into it in an 
eminent degree in the person of Jesus Christ. Just 
wherein that grace consists, an,d what form it takes, 
depends upon the specific nature and needs of those 
who are to be at once its objects and its subjects. The 
initial act of grace as Incarnation in Jesus Christ 
incorporates and expresses a principle which character- 
izes its entire operation: "'Because the children are 
partakers of flesh and blood. He also Himself in like 
manner partook of the same." The principle expressed 
is this: Grace, or Love in action, conforms and adapts 
itself precisely to its objects or subjects, and to the 
needs and wants to be supplied. Grace becomes both 
to us and in us just what we want, and in the form and 
manner in which it is possible and proper for us to 
receive it. So Jesus Christ is the life of God, object- 
ively to us, and subjectively in us, in that degree and 
manner in which we can and ought, according to our 



70 The Reason of Life 

nature, to become partakers of the divine life and 
nature. The acts or processes, in us and by us, through 
which that can be, are — our at-one-ment with God, 
our redemption from sin, and our resurrection from 
death. All these Jesus Christ accomplished and was 
in our nature; and accomplishes and becomes in our- 
selves. What God accomplishes in humanity by His 
grace, humanity accomplishes in God through its 
faith. Jesus Christ as the both divinely and humanly 
accomplished Unity of God and man, is both God and 
man in the matter — the grace by and the faith 
through which we live. 

. Grace (4) is finally and immediately the work in us 
of the Holy Ghost — through Whom, in sequence and 
conjunction with the Word, are mediated all those 
divine operations upon the earth that we might char- 
acterize as subjective: that is to say, all the influences 
which, in the beings themselves who are the subjects 
of them, draw, or fit, or assimilate them to God, and 
make them in their measure partakers of His nature. 
It is in keeping with this that it is said of the Holy 
Ghost that He takes of the things of Jesus, of the 
objectively revealed Word of God, and " shows," or 
interprets and imparts them to us. He works in us 
the subjective appreciation, appropriation, and par- 
ticipation of a truth and a life which come to us from 
without and from above. It is in this sense that the 
Holy Ghost is to us "the Giver of life" — the life He 
gives being the incarnate Word and Son of God. Thus 
the Life that was originally and eternally in God, and 



Grace to Become Sons 71 

was God: that was mediately in, and cause of, all 
else: that was then humanly and personally in the 
world in Jesus Christ — that life of God and of Jesus 
Christ His Son, is in us by impartation and participa- 
tion of His Spirit. 

How Christ is in us by His Spirit: accomplishes in 
us and by us all that He accomplished for us: and so 
makes us by His grace what He is, sons and heirs of 
God — that is just the practical and actual Christian- 
ity which we need to recover and to know. If there be 
mystery in it, as there is in all divine operations and 
in all natural facts and processes, it is not a mystery 
which cannot be rationally stated and spiritually 
apprehended. 

The life of Jesus Christ upon earth was a human 
fact and act. If it was, taken as a unit and a whole, a 
life at one with God — and so, sinless and deathless — 
it was a human life made so by His own redeeming and 
quickening act in it. There is nothing in that act of 
human regeneration and resurrection different in kind 
from any and every human life, as it is, naturally and 
supernaturally, constituted and purposed to be, and 
ought eventually to be. Our lives are ours to make 
them God's, and they are God's only as we make them 
so. If God by mere word or power without, and not 
also by spirit within — that is by our own cooperant 
act — should make our lives His, they would not be 
ours so made: there cannot be an "ours" without 
**us." We see in Jesus Christ a human life at one with 
God, "made God's": and the act by which He made 



72 The Reason of Life 

it so, we call an act of reconciliation, of at-one- 
ment, or atonement. 

We see in Jesus Christ human life, not only recon- 
ciled or made one with God, but thereby and therein 
redeemed from sin, made sinless or holy. That again is 
in no wise contradictory to the proper course of human 
nature or life in general. Sin or vice is not the proper or 
true law of human life; on the contrary, virtue is, and 
holiness and righteousness. The spotless virtue, the 
perfect holiness or righteousness of Jesus Christ, which 
was in itself in our nature a redemption from sin, was 
His own act in humanity, and precisely the act by 
which alone humanity redeems itself from sin. If 
humanity cannot be holy or sinless by act of itself, 
its only redemption from sin is through the death of 
itself into the life of God. 

We see in Jesus Christ humanity raised up out 
of inevitable death in itself into assured and eternal 
life in God. And again, this is no contradiction of 
evolution, no contradiction to the true and essential 
nature and destination of man: for it is as natural for 
him to pass from human into divine life, as to have 
passed from animal into rational and human life. 
If in each act or process of personal transition from 
stage to stage, there is involved a putting off of 
old nature, a dying from one mode of relation to 
environment to live in another mode of relation to 
environment and to self: if, as the rational man has 
to die from the brute or the animal that he was, so the 
spiritual or divine man has to die from his mere selfhood 



Grace to Become Sons 73 

which nevertheless was a necessary stage of his devel- 
opment — all this, I affirm, is part and essential part 
of the law of successive natural, rational, moral, and 
spiritual evolution. 

Why this evolution cannot have been all and only 
immanent: why there needed to come in from without 
and from above an objective, actual and historical, 
realization, revelation, and demonstration of human 
life divinely accomplished, of God manifest in man and 
of man self-completed in God, is a question to which 
something of an answer may be suggested as follows: 
To begin with, if religion, considered only on our part, 
is a transcendent act, an act of objective attitude and 
relation, a conscious and free going out of ourselves to 
a Spirit and Life of the universe which, however it may 
include and be in us, yet is infinitely without and 
transcends us — if, I say, religion is thus distinctly tran- 
scendent on our part, why must it not be similarly 
transcendent on God's part? Why must it not be 
God, as it were, coming forth from Himself to meet us, 
who — in a relative sense at least, in consciousness 
and in freedom — are as objective to Him as He to us? 
How can we, by instinct, by reason, in freedom and 
in personal act and life, go forth of ourselves to meet 
an infinite and divine Not-Ourselves, which does not 
meet and respond to us there? If I speak and God 
hears, if I cry and God answers: if in any sense, and 
to any extent, there is spiritual interrelation and inter- 
communication, then there is real transcendence, an 
objective correspondence between God and us, each in 



74 The Reason of Life 

that respect outside the one of the other. And nothing 
short of this is really religion, or is what will jBU and 
satisfy the human need and demand for religion. 

How was mortal man to enter into and share the life, 
the personal life, of God? We are speaking no longer 
now of natural life, we have passed out of the realm of 
flesh into that of spirit: "The kingdom of God is not 
meat and drink," it is holiness, and righteousness, 
and eternal life, in the Holy Ghost. And what is the 
life of spirit, as such? What are the functions and 
activities within us, in which the life of spirit consists 
and manifests itself? We can know them only under 
the personal forms of intelligence, affection, will, and 
voluntary action. If religion is not in these, it is 
nowhere for us, for these cover the whole ground of 
personal life. To know God, to need, desire, and love 
God, to will and do or obey God, to be, so far as we 
may, what God is, to have God personally in ourselves, 
and to find ourselves only and wholly in Him — in 
what other terms than these can we express or describe 
our participation in God? 

If this be the sole language or life of our finite spirits, 
as children of God, then the beginning and middle and 
end of all living relation to the life of God is that we 
shall know enough of it to enter into it and have part 
in it. Without knowledge there can be no desire or 
will or action, for there would be no object of these. 
Once, on the other hand, we know what God has shown 
us and given us in Jesus Christ, once we understand 
what Christ means and is to us — the end and object, 



Grace to Become Sons 75 

the fulness and satisfaction of all of spirit that we are 
or that is in us — then we see that, apart from the 
divine revelation and gift of Him, we were in utter and 
hopeless darkness. 

Now we see in Him the power of God indeed unto 
salvation — but the power of God acting how ? Why, 
through the knowledge, love and desire, will, and 
actual exercise and activity on our part, of everything 
that is in the truest and highest sense salvation. To 
know, love, desire, will, and serve God is salvation: 
it is His life, Himself, living in us. We see this in 
Christ, we know it in Him, we love and desire it in 
Him — and through all these we have and share it with 
Him. We see, know, and share with Him — what? 
The death in and to ourselves, the life in and to God. 
As by the birth and action of our own reasons and free 
wills we pass from animal into man, so by the new birth 
from above of the Incarnate Word and Spirit and 
Will of Jesus Christ in us, we pass from human to 
divine — up through the reason and will of incomplete, 
and imperfect, and sinful self into the Eternal Reason 
and Will that is, of right, all in all. 



VII 
THE PROCESS OF LIFE SPIRITUAL 

Christianity may be viewed under a variety of 
aspects, and expressed in various terms, but it is most 
exactly described as a life. More exactly still is it 
described by our Lord Himself, not as a life, as though 
one out of many, but as simply or absolutely Life, or 
by St. John as The Life: for the life we are speaking 
of is but one life and one thing. It cannot be properly 
described as a theory or scheme, or even a doctrine, 
of life; in direct contrast to and contradistinction from 
all these, it is the fact of life, the life itself, about which 
theories are mere speculation, and doctrines but ex- 
planations and instructions. It is not an ideal of life, 
as being even the truest conception and embodying 
the most perfect standard of life. It is contradis- 
tinguished from the ideal, as being the actual and the 
real. Neither can Christianity be properly described 
as an ethical or moral system, as a precept or law of 
life. While incidentally and ail-importantly it is this 
too, as it is all the rest, yet essentially it has to be con- 
tradistinguished from this too, as well as from all the 
rest. Christianity is not a theory but the fact, not a 
doctrine but the truth, not an ideal but the actual; 
and so, finally, not a law or requirement of life, but the 

76 



The Process of Life Spiritual 77 

life itself, not merely required, but given, received, and 
lived. 

Christianity is of course the life of Christ: and as 
such it is necessarily a life like Christ's. But, speaking 
exactly, it is distinctly not a life like Christ's in us, but 
the life of Christ in us: not a life resembling His, but 
Himself our life. Jesus Christ certainly stands to us 
in the relation of example, but even more distinctly 
not in that of mere example, but of source, and power, 
and of content and matter of our life. He is our life, 
nothing whatever merely from Him, as example, or 
influence, or direction, or command. ''I am the Life" 
is not the word He spake to us, it is the Word of God 
which He is to us. 

"The Word of Life" — God Himself, Himself- 
imparting — speaks to us, according to St. John's 
account of it, in the flesh : not through one sense only, 
but through all, through every natural avenue of human 
perception, knowledge, or experience: "That which 
was from the beginning, that which we have heard, 
that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we 
beheld and our hands handled, of the Word of Life 
(and the Life was manifested, and we have seen, and 
bear witness, and declare unto you the Life, the eternal 
Life, which was with the Father, and was manifested 
unto us)." So this, then, is the witness, the witness 
not alone of those who saw Him with eyes, and heard 
Him with ears, and handled Him with hands of flesh, 
but the witness of "every one who belie veth on the 
Son of God" (to whom God gives to have the witness 



78 The Reason of Life 

within him): namely, "That God gave unto us eternal 
life, and this life is in the Son: he that hath the Son 
hath the Life": because the Son of God is the Life. 
What response can we make to this, but to say with 
St. Paul, "I live no longer, Christ lives in me!" True 
faith in the Son of God is the death of '^me," the life 
of God in me. Our life is "hidden with Christ in God; 
when Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall we 
also appear with Him in glory." 

The prime point in all this is, that all our relation to 
Jesus Christ is of that immediate, direct, and intimate 
character which is possible for us only with God Him- 
self: "closer is He than hands or feet, and nearer to us 
than breathing." We live and move and have our 
being, not by any intermediary between God and us, 
but only by and in God Himself; and so Jesus Christ is 
our life, not through anything proceeding from Him 
at a distance in time or space, but through His own 
immediate presence and action in us. The now, and 
always, and everywhere living Christ is the only Christ 
of Christianity — or, rather, is the Christ of the one 
and only true Christianity. 

We have seen how life from the beginning, from the 
lowest physical or animal form of it, through rational 
and spiritual, up at last to eternal or divine life, is 
attributed to the Logos who in the end becomes incar- 
nate in the person of Jesus Christ. Life, which begins 
as mere "living soul" in Adam, becomes in Jesus 
Christ "quickening, or life-giving, spirit." The turning- 
point in the process may be described more in detail 



The Process of Life Spiritual 79 

than hitherto, as follows: Life becomes rational or 
human at the moment or in the act in which it is re- 
vealed to itself, when itself becomes objective and an 
object to it. This reflex or self consciousness is happily- 
expressed in the words of St. John, "and the life was 
the light of men." The distinction between lower 
beings and men, which we call reason, marks a dif- 
ference, leaps and leaves behind a chasm between 
animal and man, wider than we conceive. In it reason 
itself, immanent in all things, ceases to be mere object 
and becomes subject, ceases in nature to be thing and 
becomes person. There is reason in inanimate things 
as well as in life vegetable and animal, but it is no reason 
of theirs, nor to them. For the first time, to men is 
there upon earth a reason visible to itself in their 
persons : a knowledge and understanding of the reason 
and meaning and purpose and end of things, and chiefly 
of themselves. "That which makes manifest is light"; 
and the light that manifests to men themselves, and all 
things, and God, is Reason; which, however, is rather 
an eye to see the light than the light itself. And yet 
too, what but light can see light, what but life can 
know life? "If the eye were not sunny (of the nature 
of the sun), it could not see the sun." We can know 
ourselves because we are potential selves, and become 
actual in knowing ourselves. We know God because 
we have somewhat of God in us, because we are of God, 
and are sufficiently of His nature to become partakers 
of Himself and of His life. Only to him that hath can 
be given. 



80 The Reason of Life 

There is an intimate and necessary connection 
between human self-consciousness and self-determina- 
tion or freedom: neither could be by itself, or without 
the other. It is in the gradual and growing exercise 
of personal independence, in the equal possibility of 
opposite activities, in the fact of choice and the moral 
distinction we make in acts, that the selves in us emerge 
of which we become conscious. It is in the discovery 
through experience of law, in the fact of obedience or 
disobedience to it and the consequences that ensue, 
that we come to know ourselves and to understand the 
reason and meaning of things. If all law — in that 
case improperly so called, since both law and obedience 
or disobedience are correlatives of freedom — were 
simply immanent necessity, if we were moved without 
reason or by a reason in no sense our own, we should 
neither know reason nor be conscious of selves which 
we call our own. 

Reason, however it comes — whether or no only in 
the consciousness and exercise of personal freedom — 
could never of itself take us beyond ourselves and the 
world of sense. I do not mean that it could not, from 
the knowledge we have of ourselves and derived from 
sense-experience, draw inferences and build up specula- 
tions as to matters without us and beyond us. Reason 
of itself may thus lead us to infer, and may successfully 
justify its inference of, such a fact or truth as God, and 
may suggest true speculations as to His being and 
nature: I am not denying the possibility or rationality 
of a purely natural or innate religion. On the contrary. 



The Process of Life Spiritual 81 

if man Is naturally constituted for religion, for knowl- 
edge and life of God — although I hold that he will 
never come to these by purely immanent process 
within himself, that he will never meet God by acts 
transcending self and sense-experience unless God also 
meet Him from without these, that however he may, 
prior to consciousness and freedom, be potentially 
child of God, he can never become actually son of God 
except as, through consciousness and freedom, God 
personally communicates and imparts Himself and 
His life to him — yet, as necessary precondition of all 
this, there must and will be in the purely natural man 
himself instincts and impulses tending Godward. 
Reason may thus teach us, and teach us truly, many 
things about God — what St. Paul calls the ''invisible 
things of Him," which "from the creation of the world 
are clearly seen, being perceived through the things 
that are made." Reason, I say, may truly reveal to 
us these things of God, but it cannot possibly give us 
God. Nothing can give us God but only God Himself, 
God in some mode of personal or Self communication 
and impartation, God speaking to us and to Whom 
we may speak. 

A Person can give Himself only to persons, because 
he can be met and received only by persons. A Person 
cannot give himself, as such, immanently, but only 
transcendently. A father can give his nature and 
many things pertaining to himself to his son, by genera- 
tion or immanent transmission; himself he can give 
to him only by transcendent, objective, personal self- 
7 



82 The Reason of Life 

presentation, expression, and impartation. The per- 
sonal is only between persons, from without to within. 

The spiritual is something more than and beyond the 
natural, though it wholly presupposes and includes it. 
Man is in a double sense a spiritual being. First, he 
is by nature finite spirit: nothing but spirit can com- 
municate with or can be communicated with by Spirit. 
To say that we are made for God, for union and com- 
munion, or for unity with God, means that we are of 
like nature with God, at least to the extent of that 
union or unity with Him. But to be constituted for 
and capable of personal relation and unity with God is 
not in itself to be in that unity or relation. That God 
has given us much in nature in common with Himself, 
in order that He might then in that community of 
nature give us Himself, that the knowledge of Him 
might be our life and the service of Him our freedom, 
is not yet to have given us Himself, or life, or freedom. 
The endowment for these is not these. Just as there 
is a difference between being naturally or potentially 
rational beings or moral beings and being actually and 
really rational or moral, so there is no less difference 
between being naturally spiritual beings, or beings 
made for spirituality, and being spiritual in act and 
in fact. 

Jesus Christ spoke much of knowing the Father, and 
spoke of it, not only of Himself, but for us. We were 
to know God as He knew Him, for life; to serve God 
as He served Him, for freedom; and, in a word, to be 
to God what He was to God. Now how did our human 



The Process of Life Spiritual 83 

Lord know and serve God, and what was He to God? 
He knew Him as Father, He served Him as Son, by 
simply being as truly Son to God as God was Father to 
Him: Son not merely by nature, whether human or 
divine, but Son in act and in fact. Son by one spirit 
with the Father, as well as by one nature with the 
Father. It is a general or universal truth, that no 
man knoweth the father but the son: the only way to 
know the father is to be the son. The only way to know 
God is to know Him as Father, for that is the only 
actual true relation we can bear to Him; the only way 
we can know Him as Father is to know Him as sons, for 
we can only know Him in His relation to us by realizing 
or actualizing our relation to Him. We cannot know 
God out of true and real relation with Him, and there 
is only one real relation we can bear to Him — namely, 
being His sons, not only by bearing His nature, but 
sharing His Spirit and living His life. 

Personal or transcendent relation between God and 
man does not originate or begin with the historical 
fact of our Lord's incarnation. The divine Word and 
the divine Spirit, which are the agents of all such rela- 
tion, are described in the Scriptures as having been in 
the world from the beginning. But they could be in 
the world only as the world was prepared and able to 
receive them, and they were present in each stage of 
the world in accordance with the stage. Abraham, 
we are told, was the friend of God: and he lives still as 
permanent exponent of the faith by which God is said 
to be known. Did Abraham indeed know God through 



84 The Reason of Life 

faith: then it is possible for men through faith to know 
God. The extent or exactness or adequacy of the 
knowledge does not enter into the question. An infant 
begins to know its mother from its birth. If faith 
made perfect, as in Jesus Christ, becomes knowledge, 
then faith even in part, and in smallest part, is partial 
knowledge. There have been those in the world whom 
the world has called prophets; has God ever truly 
uttered Himself through prophets? Then it is possible 
for men to hear God, and to be real witnesses and mes- 
sengers for Him to the world. Was God actually with 
and in these men in the sense and in the way in which 
they represented Him to the world? It does not follow 
from God's being with or in them at all that He must 
have been with and in them completely or infallibly. 
The mother is just as certainly and actually in the child, 
and with it objectively or from without, from the day 
of its birth as in its maturity. The fact and reality of 
religion depends upon the possibility and the actuality 
of a transcendent, objective, free, personal relation 
between God and ourselves. God has given us a 
consciousness and a relative independence of Himself 
which are designed to enable us, and which do actually 
enable us, to know Him personally and to serve Him 
freely. The end and essence of religion is so to know, 
to love, and to serve Him, which we do only by realizing 
Him as our Father and ourselves as His children, by 
being ourselves what He is, doing as He does, and so 
sharing His life, and being partakers of His goodness, 
which is His good. 



The Process of Life Spiritual 85 

" God who in divers measures and in divers manners 
had spoken to the world by prophets, has spoken to us 
in full measure and in perfect manner in His Son." 
The turn of expression in which this truth is stated 
emphasizes the fact that God has spoken, not merely 
in the person of His Son, but in the fact and significance 
of His sonship. All that in part Abraham knew through 
faith, or that had been told through prophecy, has been 
fully manifested and communicated in the Son of 
Man who is also Son of God. We know the Father 
in the Son: we know the Father through being ourselves 
made sons. 

Humanly speaking — and we must speak humanly 
of our human Lord: in His humanity His consciousness 
,was a human consciousness — Jesus Christ knew the 
Father through His own perfect realizing of the sonship 
to God potential in humanity and made actual in Him- 
self. The human condition of a perfect sonship to God 
is perfect faith, hope, and love, perfect obedience or 
service as the expression of these, and, through and in 
all, the life of God become our life. Our Lord was 
perfect Son, and so perfectly knew the Father, through 
perfect fulfilment of the conditions and perfect accom- 
plishment of the process of human sonship. As man, 
Jesus Christ knew Himself only in terms of humanity. 
However true His deity — and it was infinitely true, for 
otherwise His humanity was impossible — it was 
humanly manifested, and cannot be known or expressed 
by us otherwise than in what He was as man. That 
He was the divine Man, the Man from heaven, the 



86 The Reason of Life 

Eternal Word, God Self -expressed in humanity. Son of 
Man because humanity itself realized and revealed — 
that was manifestation enough of His Godhead. He 
came to be known in man and as man; and it was 
neither necessary nor to the purpose that He should 
be manifested otherwise than as man. 

Man is spiritual, as distinguished from rational, not 
through any amount or truth of speculative knowledge 
about God, but only through personal relation and 
association with God Himself. No immanence, or 
community or aflSnity of mere nature, can convey or 
impart that which comes only through personal asso- 
ciation, through mutual knowledge, love, service, and 
interchange of offices and functions. The more imme- 
diately important thing even for Jesus Christ Himself 
was His oneness with the Father, not in nature alone, 
but in heart and mind and will and act; and the immedi- 
ately important thing for us is that He attained that 
oneness for us and therefore as we — not as God but 
as man, not in the exercise of omniscience and omnipo- 
tence, but in the experience of all human weakness and 
temptation and through the sole power and victory 
that come from God through faith. In a word, our 
Lord was spiritual man through all the processes and 
achievements of spiritual manhood. 

The spirit in man is the organ and faculty of the 
divine, of God in him. It is through it that we are 
by nature related and akin to God, constituted for 
Him, and capable of union and unity with Him. But 
the human spirit, as such and as part of our nature, as 



The Process of Life Spiritual 87 

mere potentiality and faculty, does not make us spir- 
itual, any more than eyes of themselves, without sun 
or light, give us sight. They are both media, not 
sources: spirituality, as sight, comes through a capacity 
within us, but from an object and source without us. 
It is only God's Spirit in and with and through our 
spirit that makes us spiritual. "Blessed are the poor 
in spirit." The first blessedness of the human spirit 
is the fact and sense of its own poverty: the essence of 
finite spirit and the condition of finite spirituality is 
poverty. What is capacity for God, but want of Him, 
dependence upon Him, utter emptiness and nothingness 
without Him? "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for 
theirs is the kingdom of heaven." What an emptiness 
is it that only heaven can fill, what a poverty that 
wants and can only be satisfied with God Himself ! 

The proper and only necessary functions of finite 
spirit are faith, hope, and love: given these in purity 
and integrity, and all else will come, for spirituality or 
for blessedness. Which simply means that if the condi- 
tions exist in us, the causes and operations will not fail 
from God. Of the three, faith, hope, and love — love 
is first as well as last: no one has real faith in, or hopes 
for, what he does not think about, desire, and love: 
love, if only yet in the form of need or want, determines 
the objects of faith and hope. But, still more, love is 
last; for it requires for its fulness and completion both 
knowledge and possession, and these for us are to be 
acquired only through the long discipline of faith and 
hope. Faith is initial, progressive, partial knowledge. 



88 The Reason of Life 

as hope is initial and partial possession: faith complete 
is the only knowledge, as hope attained and satisfied 
is the only possession, of which our finite spirits are 
capable. Necessary as it is that love should be first 
and last, and all in all — since faith and hope are but 
expressions and energies of it — it is equally necessary 
that these latter should have their place and time in 
the process of the spiritual life. To speak of knowing, 
or loving, or living, or possessing the kingdom of God 
or of heaven, all at once, without growth or process, or 
any otherwise than through spiritual evolution, is 
impossible and inconceivable for finite spirits. God 
must be long the object of faith and hope before He 
can be the possession of love and knowledge. 

It is vain to think of our Lord's spirituality as not 
having passed through and experienced all the process 
of a human faith, hope, and love. What were His 
temptations but the testing, proving, and making in 
Him of those essential spiritual graces and qualities? 
What was His victory but the complete triumph and 
crowning in His person of faith, hope, and love? It 
is true that our Lord, in His active ministry of word and 
work, never speaks of His own faith and hope, while 
inculcating them continually upon us. That proves 
much, but what is it that it proves? He never speaks 
of Himself as a fighter, but He does speak of Himself 
as the victor, as having conquered in the great battle 
of life: "I have overcome the world." And who is 
the victor but He who has fought and won? And what 
is the victory that overcometh the world? "It is even 



The Process of Life Spiritual 89 

our Faith: who is he that overcometh, but he that 
beheveth?" To beUeve in Jesus Christ is essentially 
to believe in the irresistible power and the certain 
victory of faith, hope, and love: to believe in Jesus 
Christ as the Son of God is to believe, not only in the 
eternal fact of His divine Sonship, but no less in the 
humanly accomplished act and fact of His human son- 
ship. Nor are we excluded from looking behind the 
scenes upon our Lord's hard-fought fight in the process 
of its waging and its winning: the Wilderness, the 
Garden, and the Cross teach us clearly enough that 
the work of the spirit, the strife against sin, is won only 
by resistance unto blood, is finished only in death. 

I spoke of life, natural, rational, moral, spiritual, 
eternal, as all associated with the evolutional increation 
and incarnation of the Word or Son of God. Eternal 
life is but the end and completion of one continuous 
process. Spiritual life is eternal life begun here in 
faith and hope: eternal life is spiritual completed in 
faith become sight, and hope become possession and 
fruition. 



VIII 

THE SPIRITUAL THROUGH THE NATURAL 

There can be no question about calling Christian- 
ity a life, nor about calling it the life of God in the soul 
— that is to say, in the personality and the personal 
life of man. Neither, from the standpoint of the New 
Testament and of historical faith, can there be any 
question about all living Christianity's being the per- 
sonal life of the living and present Christ — not any- 
thing merely of or from Him, as example, or influence, 
or virtue, or even grace, or spirit, but Himself in us. 
St. Paul's "I live not, Christ lives in me" is nothing 
more than the implicit attitude of the New Testament 
and of the Church whose expression it was and is. 
" In Jesus Christ," the baptismal, sacramental place 
and status of the Christian man, the ego or "I," the 
old man, the self of sin and death, is dead, and He 
takes its place and lives in me. That 5s possible by 
virtue of what Jesus Christ means and is to me. Just 
as the brute in us dies into the rational, free, moral man, 
so the natural man dies into the spiritual. By the 
natural, as well as supernatural, process of a living 
faith, hope, and love in Jesus Christ, not alone the 
virtue, the grace and power, but the very act and fact 

90 



The Spiritual Through the Natural 91 

of His death to sin and life in God, are communicated 
and imparted to us. The old self dies, and a new Self 
which is more truly ourself lives in its stead. The 
very life itself of this new Self in us is the death of the 
old: living in the Spirit and so walking in It, we cease 
to fulfil the lusts or to live the life of the flesh. As 
St. Peter expresses it, Jesus Christ has ** brought us to 
God" through having been "put to death in the flesh, 
and quickened, or made alive, in the spirit." That 
act becomes ours only through His becoming "we," 
taking the place of our old selves and becoming the 
new and true Self in us. Jesus Christ may no doubt 
be truly called the Ideal Man, or each man's Ideal 
Self, but He is infinitely more than that: an ideal, 
merely as such, is an abstraction; Jesus Christ is our 
actual and real True Self. Man in the mind of God, in 
the eternal foreknowledge and f orepurpose of God, man 
"as he shall be when his becoming shall be complete," 
is not less but more man than in his inchoate begin- 
nings and in his incomplete processes. Our Lord is not 
our ideal self. He is our eternal, divine, accomplished, 
assured, and perfect Self. Myself apart from Him 
who is God in me, the everlasting truth and meaning 
of me, my eternal life and self, is not I. Losing self 
and life in Him I find them, and finding them apart 
from Him I lose them. 

There are two truths involved in this, each of which 
is more than Hable to be lost in part or in whole. In 
the first place, Jesus Christ was Himself not only the 
Life that was with God, and was God, and was mani- 



92 The Reason of Life 

fested to us; He was also that life made ours and 
manifested in us. And as such, it was in Him, in His 
oneness with us, precisely the same in kind with our 
life now in Him. For Him as for us, in our common 
relation with the Father, was the "Not I, but Thou," 
*'Not mine, but Thine;" ''I can do nothing of myself." 
"Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the 
Father in me.^^ The words that I say unto you I speak 
not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth 
His works." The Son can do nothing "of Himself," 
apart from His "oneness with the Father." That 
truth, in all its human signification and application, 
our Lord first realized for us in His own humanity, and 
so, in its converse, too, that "in oneness with the Father 
the Son can do and be all things," He has made it 
forever applicable to us as to Himself. In Him the 
perfection of faith grew into sight and knowledge, 
the consummation of hope became actual possession; 
the fulness of the life of God manifested in Him was 
manifest in the fulness of the life that humanly was 
Himself and His own. The Son of God became man, 
and the man that He became and was, just as truly 
and completely, by human act and process, incarnated 
the Divine Word of God in His humanity, as the 
divine and eternal Word incarnated Himself in Him. 
As the Deity in Him became human, so the humanity 
in Him became divine, and God and man in His person 
were One. So Jesus Christ was the Way of Life in 
both directions, from God to manward and from man 
to Godward: from God to us He was Love, Grace, 



The Spiritual Through the Natural 93 

Fellowship; from us to God He was Faith, Hope, Love, 
eternal Life. 

In the second place, not only was Jesus Christ Him- 
self our life in all the human way and order and process 
of it — through faith to grace, and through grace to 
glory; but Jesus Christ is Himself our life, in all 
our own progress from grace to grace, and finally to 
glory. We progress just in proportion as (1) "it is 
not we but He in us," and (2) as it is not only He 
but we too, finding and realizing ourselves in Him. 
The living and present Christ operative in us for hfe 
now, is just as necessary a truth as the dead and risen 
Christ operating for us for life long ago. 

We are being, not too often or too much if we take 
it aright, reminded in these days that the life of God 
or of Christ in us does not mean life out of or apart 
from the world, but rather the divinely right life in the 
world. It is a spiritual life because it is essentially, 
not only a life of the Spirit, but a spirit of life. One, 
and one only, spirit characterizes and manifests it. 
Hereby know we that we are of God, or of Christ, and 
that we abide in Him and He in us — by the spirit 
that He has given us. We know that we are of His 
Spirit, by the spirit that we ourselves are of. That 
Spirit, or spirit, we know, is Love; and although in a 
sense it is truly expressed in the words " Love not 
the world nor the things that are in the world,'' 
yet it is not in the sense that the Object or objects 
of our love are wholly in another world and not in 
this. We do not perhaps need to be reminded that 



94 The Reason of Life 

the contrary is the truth, but how and how much it 
is the truth, we do need to reaUze much better than 
we do. The same Apostle in the same epistle in 
which he bids us not to love the world and the things 
that are in it, teaches us that, if we do not love our 
brother whom we can see, we cannot love God whom 
we cannot see: which embodies a great principle. If 
our life is not in our relations here, and is not all that 
it ought to be in them, it can neither be what it should 
be, nor be at all, in relations elsewhere. Life is corre- 
spondence with environment — its own, actual envi- 
ronment, and not another. Life here may fit us for 
another, but there cannot be another save through 
this and as the sequel and result of this. The condi- 
tions and circumstances of earth are precisely those 
that are fitted and suited to develop in us the actions 
and characters that make up our lives. In bettering 
them, and making them what they ought to be, we are 
actually making, shaping, and determining ourselves. 
To make this world all that it ought to be, to see that 
the will of God is done on earth as it is done in heaven, 
to convert the imperfect and the wrong in all of our 
present experience into the perfect and the right of a 
divine standard which God has written in our minds 
and revealed to our faith, is the only way to make 
heaven for ourselves, or to achieve that kingdom of 
God which is the goal of spiritual desire. We com- 
plain that the world is made what it is, forgetting that 
it is not made but still in the making, and that it is 
here for us to make it what it ought to be, and that it 



The Spiritual Through the Natural 95 

is no better only as we do not make it better. If the 
world is our proper environment, in reaction with which 
we are to make ourselves, and in making which we are 
to make ourselves, how else are we to expect it to be 
better than by our making it so? The right reaction 
of life upon environment and of environment upon life 
is the only mean or hope of either. 

We forget how much of the good that Jesus "went 
about doing" was spent upon human and earthly con- 
ditions, and how much He makes the final judgment 
upon us to turn upon the same way and kind of "doing 
good." We are to find Him, as we are to find God, in 
all that needs us, and especially in all who need us, 
here. To go away from this, or these, in search of 
Him elsewhere or by Himself, is to seek Him where, for 
us at least. He is not. 

In our fancied spirituality, we are perhaps too much 
inclined to seek and to find the goodness of Jesus in 
His concern for the spiritual and eternal conditions and 
welfare of men. We say that His bodily helps and 
healings are only temporary object lessons and parables 
of His permanent mission and ministry as physician 
of souls: '*That ye may know that the Son of man 
hath power on earth to put away sin" — then, in proof. 
He put away sickness. Of course, there is much truth 
on that side, but on the other side too there is this to 
be said: Spiritual life is not something that can be 
detached and separated from natural or even from 
bodily life. The senses, the appetites and passions, 
all bodily functions, all pleasures and pains, are part 



96 The Reason of Life 

of the soul that needs to be saved : and only as they are 
spiritualized, and sanctified, and so rationalized and 
moralized, is the soul itself saved, of which they are 
constituent and determining elements. We are not 
ourselves apart from all these parts of ourselves; and 
while some of them may be organs and functions of 
life only as life is here and now, yet even these in their 
time and place in the process of life enter not slightly 
into the determination of what shall be our life here- 
after. The bodily and natural life is therefore to be 
dealt with immediately and wisely and lovingly in the 
interest of the spiritual life which is inseparably con- 
nected with it; and the dealing with it in the right 
spirit and the right way is a very large part of our 
present spirituality. Patience, endurance, fortitude, 
courage, temperance, self-control, self-discipline, and 
general physical efficiency, have all directly much to 
do with the body, and are all none the less spiritual 
virtues and graces. Sympathy, pity, charity, relief, 
and help, which have even a greater part in our spirit- 
ual activities, have scarcely less to do with the earthly 
and bodily conditions of others. 

Indeed, the spiritual in our life is so largely the 
spirit and temper in and with which we deal with the 
temporal and the natural, that in the life of Jesus and 
of the New Testament the danger is rather that of 
seeing little else or more than that in it. There is, of 
course, much there of God and of Heaven, but the God 
and heaven of our Lord and His Apostles are mostly 
in the world, not out of it. The concern is vastly more 



The Spiritual Through the Natural 97 

with the now and here than with the elsewhere and 
hereafter. Faith indeed has everything to do with 
the absent and the future, but its whole function and 
concern with them is to make them present, in both 
time and space. In the spirit of the New Testament 
all our desire and effort should be, not to go to heaven, 
but rather to bring heaven to us, and to establish it 
upon earth: the kingdom of God is in need of nothing 
with Him in heaven; what it needs is to be set up 
among us upon earth. The things of faith are indeed 
absent and future, but that is just what they ought not 
to be, or to continue to be; we shall go to them only 
through bringing them to us. Our Lord ''brought us 
to God" through dying to all distance or separation 
from Him, and living in nearness and oneness with 
Him. 

The important question for us then is. What is the 
life of God, and of Christ, here and now: in what 
spirit, and by what spirit, shall we know ourselves in 
Him and Him in us? If we concern ourselves aright 
with the present and with earth, we may trust God for 
the future and its heaven. We do ourselves make and 
determine our future and our heaven, but the earth 
and the present are our only time and place for making 
them, and furnish all the material and the means out 
of which and by which they are made. 

If we would study yet more particularly the form 
which the life of God and of Christ assumes among us 
upon earth, and the spirit that actuates and character- 
izes it, we shall find no more exact account of it than 
8 



98 The Reason of Life 

in our Lord's own words: "Ye know the rulers of the 
Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise 
authority over them. Not so shall it be among you: 
but whosoever would be great among you let him be 
your minister, and whosoever would be first among 
you shall be your servant: even as the Son of man 
came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and 
to give His life a ransom for many." With regard to 
the last clause, we may safely pass by all controver- 
sial theology by agreeing upon only so much of common 
interpretation as the following: The "giving" of our 
Lord's life, or soul, or self (for all these three are in- 
cluded in the term used), was certainly the cost or 
price of our redemption by Him, no matter why or 
how it was by that effected. It was that act of perfect 
love, service, and sacrifice on His part that in fact 
redeems and saves humanity. The act was in itself 
human redemption, salvation, and eternal life: for in 
it, humanity in His person conquered sin, death, and 
hell, put all enemies under its feet, and is seated as 
victor at the right hand of God, as participant in His 
holiness, righteousness, and eternal life. The admix- 
ture of imagery or figure with literal fact in that state- 
ment, in no wise impairs its truth, and is of help to the 
imagination in conceiving it. This supreme act of 
our Head, of the Leader or Captain of our salvation, 
of the Author and Finisher of our faith, is accepted by 
God, and appropriated by us, as ours: because it is 
ours — not only potentially through the grace of God 
assured to us in Christ, but actually upon the sole 



The Spiritual Through the Natural 99 

condition of our faith's taking and making it ours. 
Upon the details and methods of this divine salvation 
we may differ indefinitely, theoretically or specula- 
tively; and yet, practically and substantially, can agree 
perfectly in knowing ourselves to be indeed dead unto 
sin in the death, and alive unto God in the Ufe of our 
risen Lord. 

It is, however, the spirit before and behind all this, 
of which I wish to speak as the breath and principle 
of the life of Christ in us. The life of man, as the life 
of God, is essentially and necessarily a ministry and a 
service. It lives in giving itself, and ceases to live in 
ceasing to give. It is a fundamental fact in itself, 
independently of the authority upon which it is stated, 
that ''it is more blessed to give than to receive." 
Aristotle says substantially what our Lord says. Re- 
ceiving, or merely having, is passivity; using, giving, 
spending, are activities; and life and blessedness are 
acts and activities — energies and actualities, not mere 
states, or conditions, or potentialities. The Self in us 
is at its best and highest in an act of pure love, service, 
and sacrifice. "Not that which goeth into a man either 
defiles, or beautifies, or blesses him, but only that which 
comes forth from him:" for only that is he, which 
proceeds from himself. 

It is not mere giving, of course, that is the true 
expression of Christ, but giving life, soul, self. And 
there is no either true giving of self, or true self or life 
to give, that is not Love. If God can define Himself 
as Love, can comprehend and express all that He is 



100 The Reason of Life 

within the compass of those four letters and that single 
syllable — it is not too much, nor too little, for us to 
say that all true life, true selfhood, or true blessedness 
in us is love. It is not enough, in describing love as 
the essence and principle of life, as the sole principle 
of all true and real life, to insist upon its rightness; 
we must assert, above and beyond that, its absolute 
and sole blessedness. It is not only the sum and sub- 
stance of all our duty, the fulfilling of the whole law of 
life; it is also our highest good and happiness. The 
"right" is but the rule or law of the "good," the for- 
mulation and expression of our obligation to it. The 
Good, therefore, as an end is higher and more ultimate 
than the Right as a way or means. If "goodness" 
itself, which is the activity and natural expression of 
Love, and is the principle and essence of rightness or 
duty, is "will of the good," then it would seem that 
good, as the end, is something above and beyond even 
goodness, as the will and the way. What then is the 
Good, to which all ways lead and all means tend.^^ It 
cannot be conceived or expressed otherwise than as at 
once the perfection and the blessedness of Life. 

If life, which is inseparable and indistinguishable 
from its movement, its exercise and activity, its use 
and application, were not in itself a pleasure, a happi- 
ness, a blessedness, there is no other sense in which it 
would be a good. Why should we want it, for ourselves 
or for others, to be complete or perfect, or to be at all, 
if it were the pleasure, and so the desire and the will, 
of no one. Our individual life might be only a pain to 



The Spiritual Through the Natural 101 

ourself , and yet, because it is a duty or a good to others, 
or the will or law of God, we choose to continue it. In 
that case, not only has the pleasure, the desire, or the 
will of others been the end which has determined our 
action, but that end has determined us only by becom- 
ing our own dominant pleasure, desire, and will. We 
cannot escape the conclusion that pleasure, happiness, 
blessedness, is not only the actual and universal, but is 
the proper and necessary end and determinant of life. 
Our freedom, our responsibility, our wisdom, and our 
salvation, is in the choice of our pleasures, in the quality 
and material of our happiness, in the truth and purity 
of our blessedness. In choosing God and the Kingdom 
of Heaven we have made the wisest and best possible 
choice, but we have not chosen God because He is our 
duty alone, but because He is our highest pleasure or 
joy, our truest happiness, our essential life and blessed- 
ness. Or, if we have chosen Him from duty, then we 
have made duty our dominant pleasure, desire, and 
will, or happiness. 

Which is the higher and the ultimate. Goodness 
or Good — good, which is personal perfection and 
blessedness, or goodness, which is will of the good 
to others and to all? The answer is that they are 
one and the same, and neither can be first or second. 
If good is life, and life is love, and love is good- 
ness — then goodness, and love, and life are identical 
and are the sole and the only good. It follows that 
the spiritual, moral, divine end and aim of life is not 
reached by the surrender or sacrifice of pleasure or 



102 The Reason of Life 

happiness, in their true sense, to duty. What we need 
for that abundance of life which our Lord came into 
the world to bring and to bestow, is not to deny or 
mortify pleasure or happiness, but to raise it to its 
highest place and power. We do this when we learn 
that the highest good is the being good, and that to be 
good is to will and to do good. The true goal is yet 
afar off, it is only in the way and on the way of ultimate 
attainment, so long as it is to us only the object of 
duty, a matter only of law and obligation. Loving, 
willing, being good, are attaining perfection with us 
in the measure in which they are ceasing to be law and 
becoming spirit, are ceasing to be duty and becom- 
ing a pleasure and a passion, our happiness and our 
blessedness. 

The philosophy of all this is, that the good gift of 
God to us is the life that is His own. If life is a good, 
its good is to be found, not in its mere potentiality or 
possession, but in its use and exercise, in its proper 
functions and energies and activities. All these are 
given in the actual and manifold relations, associations, 
and interactions of human life. Of all these there is 
one all-embracing, all-constructive, all-suflBcient spirit, 
and principle, and law — the spirit, principle, law of 
love and goodness. Love is the fulfilling of the whole 
law of life — that is, only in it is life fulfilled, goodness 
attained, and good secured. 



IX 
LOVE THE SEMINAL PRINCIPLE OF LIFE 

Christianity is not a life, so long as it remains only 
a theory, an ideal, or a sentiment, or all these to- 
gether. Life, as contradistinguished from all these, is 
the one reality, and it exists only as it is actual. All 
that is merely thought or felt or said about it adds 
nothing to the real knowledge of it; it can be known 
only by being lived. To "know" God, or His Son 
Jesus Christ, or eternal life, in the New Testament is 
synonymous with being in actual possession of, in 
living relation and association with them. "If we 
say that we know Him, or that we have fellowship 
with Him, and are still walking in darkness, we lie 
and do not the truth." We must be " born from 
above " in order to be able to " see " the Kingdom of 
God; and birth is an act or incident of life, not of 
thought or reasoning or feeling; however it may be 
necessarily connected with all these also, it is insep- 
arable from its distinctive movement and action and 
actuality. 

The practical question then is. How shall we make 
our Christianity the life, the activity or actuality, 
which alone Christianity really is? We shall not have 
it by merely telling or being told it; but, having it, we 

103 



104 The Reason of Life 

may have it better by a clearer apprehension and ex- 
pression of what it is. So let us reflect — and try not 
merely to speculate — a little further upon what the 
life of Christ is in this world. 

The first diflSculty in the practical understanding of 
the Christian life is found in the ambiguity of the one 
word which ought of itself perfectly to express it — 
and does not, because it is itself so profaned and de- 
graded — the word Love. Like every other element 
or principle of our human life, love has had its evolution, 
and carries the marks of its lower stages. It originated 
and is still rooted in sensuous or bodily instinct and 
appetite or passion. Its elemental function is repro- 
duction and propagation; its first form is sexual union. 
Sexual love is primitive or original love, and the source 
of all other. Directly out of it, and in the genetic order 
of organic growth, proceeds every other form of human 
love, parental, filial, fraternal, domestic, social, political, 
racial, humanitarian. Marital affection, relation, asso- 
ciation, is the source, not only of all life, but of all the 
mutual offices and functions, all the reciprocal rights 
and duties, among men. 

If it should be asked. What on the whole and in the 
end is the reason and meaning, the final and determining 
ground and cause of the sexual or marital relation, no 
one would venture to answer, that it is for bodily or 
sensuous gratification. And yet it is necessary to 
mention that : not merely because so many do make it 
the end, but because the practical and necessary reason 
for even that lowest feature of sexual love is plain 



Love the Seminal Principle of Life 105 

enough: there must be the elemental physical impulse 
and impulsion strong enough and universal enough to 
ensure always and everywhere the ends to be subserved. 

Many more will say, and yet it is manifestly still not 
enough to say, that the end of the sexual relation is 
the propagation of the species. The species is indeed 
propagated through the sexual relation: we are not, 
however, considering either the fact or the necessity 
of propagation, but only the reason and propriety of 
that particular way of it. No doubt some self-working 
and eflfective process of propagation was necessary, but 
why the method of sexual differentiation, complementa- 
tion, and union? It is impossible to say that reproduc- 
tion might not have been more simply effected than 
through the device of the conjunction and cooperation 
of man and woman. That it is by that shows, in its 
highest form of human marriage, conclusive evidence 
that the natural institution has ends and uses that far 
transcend those of mere propagation. 

Indeed, why should propagation be so carefully 
ensured, be so much of an end? The answer can be 
found only in the fact that there are, in the life con- 
served by it, values and uses far transcending those of 
mere being, or being propagated; and we can begin to 
see that the manner of propagation has meaning and 
application for these higher uses and goods, and is 
determined and fitted to them as well. Propagation 
is an end, not in itself, but only as a condition of higher 
ends which are necessary to explain it. We have 
always to carry along with us the principle, that final 



106 The Reason of Life 

cause and suflScient reason reveal themselves only in 
the consummation and completion of processes and 
evolutions. Very much of all of nature that went 
before him becomes explicable only in man; and very 
much in man himself, as well as in all antecedent nature, 
becomes explicable only as we come to see and know 
" Him as He is," who, as first and final cause of our 
being, carries in Him all the reason and meaning, all 
the truth and purpose, of ourselves. 

It becomes already very plain that in the institution 
of male and female, in all that they are for each other 
in the entire range of their complex being, in the close 
relations and intimacies and mutual dependences that 
necessarily exist between them, in the propagation and 
nurture of offspring, and the formation and conduct 
of families, the most perfect foundation is laid and the 
completest provision made for that social state and 
environment in whose relations and associations human 
life at its highest was to be spent and to find itself. In 
a word, the ultimate reason and use of sex, of male and 
female, man and woman, and the close conjunction 
between them, is found in the principle of rational and 
free social union and unity. " Man is a social being," 
is the first word of the science or philosophy of human 
life. 

**To be" means to be in relation: nothing exists 
except in definite place with respect to every other 
thing; that which is nowhere is not at all. And every- 
thing in the world is in definite relation, not only of 
place, but of interaction, more or less immediate or 



Love the Seminal Principle of Life 107 

remote, with everything else in the world. This vital 
and active interrelation is the very essence and principle 
of being. What is true of being is truer of that higher 
form of being which we call "living" — and truer as 
life is higher and highest. A dog may be a dog though 
it has not seen or come into contact with another dog; 
but a man cannot be a man without conscious relation 
and association with other men. Human life is possible 
only in society: the individual lives only in the common 
life, and is only as he enters into and fulfils its natural 
relations, shares its aims, ideas, and sentiments, takes 
part in the division of its necessary labor, and con- 
tributes his proportion to its good and its happiness. 

Unity and community is the essence and condition 
of Hfe; and it originates in the union and communion 
of man and woman in the closest of bonds, grows into 
the unity of the family, and widens from that into the 
oneness of the clan, the state, the nation, and humanity. 
It is not enough to say that "Nature" — we must 
express it in terms of more "wise and understanding 
action" and say that "God hath made of one blood all 
nations of men for to dwell upon the face of the whole 
earth." All comes from one common parentage, the 
union of the man and the woman in the symbolic garden 
of the world's infancy. The woman was to be to the 
man "a help meet for him," a help-mate to him, the 
partner, not only of his sensuous pleasure, of his racial 
instinct, of his useful or necessary toil, but of his whole 
life, in its highest and farthest reaches as well as in its 
lowest and most elemental commonplaces. The Chris- 



108 The Reason of Life 

tian law and ideal of marriage is as much part, and 
highest part, of nature's institution of the sex relation, 
as reason and freedom were part of nature's original 
institution of man, although neither was visible or 
was present in the first beginnings, but has arisen only 
in the fulness of time and by a process of evolution. 

Who will claim that when youthful pleasure ceases, 
and domestic utilities have come to an end, nothing 
more remains of the marriage relation? The true wife 
has become to the true husband that nearest and dearest 
"alter ego," in whom the "ego" finds the other and 
better half of itself. Is the divine help provided for man 
not "meet" and competent for this highest service and 
ministry? Is the help-mate to be a mate only in the 
lowest and not also in the highest functions of life, co- 
heir of the grace of eternal life as well as sharer of the 
pains and toils and experiences upon the way to it? 
All a man's personal, moral, and spiritual selfhood 
comes out in relation and association and correspond- 
ence with other selves, in mutual knowledge and love 
and cooperation; and the true intercourse and mutual 
complementing of the sexes, for which the diflference 
was instituted, is the root and source and fountain of 
all that is most beautiful and elevating and noble, as 
well as of all that is most natural and elemental, in 
human life. yV^hen the marriage relation shall have 
been degraded into a consent for temporary pleasure 
and convenience, human life, in all that is worth propa- 
gating, will have withered up from the root. 

Love is neither all itself nor truly itself uutU it has, 



Love the Seminal Principle of Life 109 

not necessarily outgrown nor lost, but certainly tran- 
scended, its sensuous origin and its selfish gratifica- 
tions. True love, as such and as separate from the 
alloy which takes its name and is its contradictory, is 
of and for "the other," above all supremely wills the 
good of the other. "Herein is love, that a man lay 
down his life for his friend." In most human associa- 
tions and relationships it is the law of nature that the 
lower elements of mere earthly appetite and utility, as 
temporary means and stages, shall gradually fade and 
die out into the abiding unities and realities of real love 
and true life, the affinities and associations of souls 
and selves, and not merely of bodies and business. 

The sexual relation, then, is for love and life, in the 
highest reaches and meaning of each — for the produc- 
tion and nurture of social relations, functions, and 
affections, for the completest development and the 
highest activities and satisfactions of the entire social 
nature. Love is nearest perfection, and the most 
effectually perfects and blesses the life, the soul, the 
self, when it is least for self and most for its object — 
for God as its supreme Object, and for the manifold 
" others " in whom God gives Himself to be loved and 
served, in loving and serving whom we most effectually 
love and serve Him. 

The Christian measure and standard of love is that 
we love others as we love ourselves; against which there 
is nothing to be said, if we take in its whole meaning. 
It lowers love to create or assume a schism and a dif- 
ference between the self-love which is proper and neces- 



110 The Reason of Life 

sary to us and other-love. It is no real self-denial or 
abnegation to love others as ourselves, when in doing 
so we are most truly and effectively loving ourselves 
as well as others. Our true and whole self is not in 
ourself alone and can never be found there. It is to 
be found only in all our proper relations with all others 
and all else. And the All in all is God: we can find 
neither self nor God save in all. God, our neighbor, 
and our self are all One in the all-embracing unity of 
Love, and neither can be loved apart from the others. 
So love is the fulfilling of the whole law of life. 

Love means willing the good — such willing as 
includes doing and being. Now the good, in all its 
stages of pleasure, happiness, blessedness, is something 
which can originally and primarily be known only in 
ourselves and as our own. Love or goodness, which 
is the essence and principle and source of all other- 
regarding, all duty or righteousness, all law and obliga- 
tion, all morality, all justice, generosity, or benevolence 
— goodness, I repeat, which is pure altruism, is willing 
to others that which we have found and can know as 
good only in ourselves. The feeling, the experience, 
the consciousness of worth and value, the help and 
advantage, the pleasure, happiness, blessedness, which 
we could never have known in others, or outside the 
field of our own sensibility and cognition, we find a 
thousand-fold multiplied by being shared with others 
and as the property of all. Thus good, which is pri- 
marily egoistic, or one's own, finds itself ultimately 
and completely only in goodness, which is purely altru- 



Love the Seminal Principle of Life 111 

istic, is found only out of oneself in others. Goodness 
at last is the only real or true good, because it combines 
and unifies all the good of self with all the good of others : 
the good of seK, because in sharing or imparting one's 
good, in the act of love, service, and sacrifice, one attains 
that purest and highest exercise and experience of finite 
selfhood, which is the only definition of blessedness; 
and yet again, because in thus making all our good 
the good of others, we have made the good of all 
others our own. 

In willing the good of others, and indeed of ourselves, 
we are liable to no less fatal mistakes as to what is 
good or what good is, than we are as to what love is. 
The ambiguity of both terms runs into direct contra- 
dictions of the things intended by them. So-called 
love may be the grossest and most brutal selfishness 
and cruelty; and good or goodness, so-called, may be, 
and too often is, the worst of evils. Love, in order to 
be kept true to itself and its name, is in need of a very 
high science or philosophy of good. How much of the 
well-meant philanthropy and charity of the past, with 
truer conceptions of human life and rights, has come 
to be regarded as curse rather than blessing — too 
often the condescension of the proud privileged to the 
humble defrauded. How late and how true the cry 
of the poor. What we want and ask, is not pity and 
charity, but justice and opportunity. 

What a height and depth of thought our Saviour 
opens up tons in the suggestion or reminder, that a man 
may gain the whole world, and lose himseK, his soul. 



112 The Reason of Life 

all his true life! or, on the contrary, may lose the 
whole world and therein — possibly thereby — win 
himself, his soul, his life. In the true universal sense, 
not in the narrow, false, selfish sense, a man's good is 
himself, his own part, the thing that is appointed him, 
and not another, to be and to do in the world: "The 
work the Father hath given me to accomplish, even 
the work that I do, that beareth witness of me, that 
the Father hath sent me." 

Such commonplaces as, that mere natural goods 
must be subordinated to moral and spiritual, that we 
must not serve a man's pleasure or ease or material 
interests, his selfishness, at the expense or to the detri- 
ment of himself, have of course their truth and use. 
The trouble and diflficulty, to the point of impossibility, 
is to know all a man's good, and still more, how always 
to serve him to the true end of it. We can at least 
have the consistent and habitual true will of it in our 
own minds and hearts; so, to the extent of our purpose, 
shall we be living for the common good, and indirectly, 
by the happiest indirection, be securing our own. 

At the point where we now are, it is not the meaning 
of either love or good, on the whole, which is in question, 
so much as the complex details of the ways and means 
to them. Good is the fulness of real life, and, second- 
arily, all that ministers to it. Love is the perfect will 
of the good, not only to ourselves, but equally to all. 
The question is not whether but how we shall love, and 
not what good is, but, in the complex conditions of 
human life, what things are good. Here we must study 



Love the Seminal Principle of Life 113 

God's mind and methods as revealed to us in the human 
life of Jesus Christ; for His ways of love are often very- 
different from ours, and the means and instruments of 
good which He employs are not seldom received and 
treated by us as only evils. 

The one point upon which the world seems willing 
to agree as to the content of the teaching of Jesus, is 
the Fatherhood of God and the divine sonship of man. 
Now the sonship is realized and revealed for us in the 
human experience and person of Jesus Christ Himself; 
as also the full fact and truth of the divine Fatherhood 
is felt and known first by Him. He is God's " Beloved 
Son" among all the children of men, in Vv^hom all the 
truth on both sides of the mutual relationship is fulfilled 
and manifested. It is only as "of His fulness we all 
receive," that "He gives us power to become sons of 
God." God's way of love with Jesus Christ is His way 
of love with us, and the good He wrought in and upon 
Him is the good He has in store for us. 

The very strongest evidence and expression of the 
Father's love for the Son, and for the sons whom He 
takes by like process unto Himself, is contained in 
the words, "He who spared not His own Son . . . 
how shall He not also with Him freely (and in the same 
way, by the same means) give us all things?" If the 
Son, or the son, is to receive the " all things " of God, 
he is to be spared nothing of the conditions or means 
or circumstances, on his part, of their acquisition and 
enjoyment. Not one jot or tittle of the toil or the pain 
or the stern discipline of human life can be spared him 
9 



114 The Reason of Life 

who is to win and wear "the eternal weight of glory" 
they are to *work out' in him who suffers and survives. 
We are to "run with patience the race that is set before 
us, looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our 
faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured 
the Cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the 
right hand of the throne of God." The point is, that 
human or earthly conditions, the most difficult and the 
most painful, are not things to be set aside for us in the 
matter of our salvation: we are to be saved, not from, 
but through and by them. It is not that life is to be a 
matter of mere patience and submission; we are not 
to submit to evils, but still less are we simply to com- 
plain of them or expect them to be removed out of our 
way. Evils are here for us to remove, to conquer 
either by abolishing or else by rising upon and above. 
Are not, for us at least, all moral and spiritual goods 
conquests of opposite and possible evils? 

The love of God seeks only Us: the good of God 
consists only in what we ourselves are. And the "all 
things" that are working together to that end — 
whatever they may be in themselves — are in His 
hands only goods of God; though they come to us in 
all the gloom of Gethsemanes and with all the pain 
and shame of Calvaries. 



DIVINE LOVE IN HUMAN SERVICE 

We need to bring our Christianity down more closely 
and intimately into the natural and common life of this 
earth. There is much in our life here, necessary and 
right now, that will probably not survive with us our 
present conditions. But even these things have their 
place and their part in their time, and will survive if 
not in themselves yet in the use we have made of them 
and in the permanent effects their use or abuse has left 
in ourselves. A man's respiration, circulation, and 
digestion, in so far as they are automatic and parts of a 
general nature that goes on without him, may not be 
properly or permanently himself, but they are certainly 
parts of his present self, and so far as they are in his 
power and under his control for more or less healthy 
and eflScient action, they are not only himself, but very 
important parts of his duty and his religion. Upon 
the action and efl&ciency of the lower and commoner 
functions of life depend most directly the vitality of 
the higher and permanent ones. Every natural im- 
pulse, appetite, and passion of the physical life has its 
necessary and important part, and leaves its permanent 
influence and impress, in the sum total of the immortal 
being who originated in it and has lived through it. 

115 



116 The Reason of Life 

Religion should begin early, embrace everything, and 
neglect nothing in the successive stages and long proc- 
ess of human life, for every moment and element in 
the evolution has its distinct and necessary contribu- 
tion to make to the final result. The neglect of the 
earthly life in the interest of a heavenly is a funda- 
mental error. 

Marriage, the family, the community, society in 
general, as a living organism rather than an artificial 
organization, is older than any history we have of it. 
States are older than statesmen, just as languages 
existed before grammarians. Social life as well as 
physical has its principles and laws antedating our 
science or philosophy of them. The more closely we 
follow nature the better, so long as we really follow her, 
so long as we interpret nature in her highest meanings 
and follow her along her truest lines. God and nature 
are not two but One: Nature's determinations and 
destinations are God's predestinations working them- 
selves out in the processes He has appointed them. 
There is no natural institution of society that is not 
infinitely perfectible, and yet none that does more 
than look toward a perfection that is infinitely far 
off. It is not God's plan or purpose to create by fiat a 
perfect social condition upon earth. From the begin- 
ning He has created by the action of a law within 
things, by the interaction of things among themselves. 
In the world of human intelligence and freedom He has 
by natural processes instituted a perfectible social 
state or condition, and devolved upon its subjects the 



Divine Love in Human Service 117 

task of carrying on and perfecting it. This devolving 
the social condition and progress of the world upon its 
subjects, and leaving it there, is wholly for the sake and 
in the interest of the subjects themselves, for it is only 
thus that they become " selves " or " themselves " at all. 
In using the intelligence that human life requires they 
acquire intelligence, in exercising their own wills they 
develop freedom, in restraining and regulating freedom 
they originate law, in rectifying and formulating law 
they institute justice and produce righteousness, in 
perfecting social conditions in general they make them- 
selves or build up personality. 

To complain that human institutions, that any 
human institution is defective or imperfect, to require 
in thought that things with us should have been or 
should be made more perfect or less imperfect than 
they are, is to refute or seek to invert the entire intent 
and beneficence of nature or of creation: which is not 
that there should be a necessarily and mechanically 
perfect world, but that there shall be a world of intelli- 
gently, freely, and personally perfect persons, made so 
or become so, or becoming so, through the long and 
difficult and painful task and achievement of themselves 
personally perfecting the world. We are no judges 
or measurers of the time requisite for such a process, 
and as to the methods followed or the means used in it 
we ought surely to know that neither effort, nor pain, 
nor doubt and uncertainty, nor possibility of error 
or wrong, nor the fact of evil, nor indeed any one of our 
actual conditions in the world, could have been spared 



118 The Reason of Life 

from among the ingredients. As a matter of fact, not 
only our wills, as the poet says, but our selves, our 
conditions, our world, are all "ours, we know not how"; 
we know not how, but we do know why: "They are 
ours, to make them God's." God's end in it all is not 
Himself to make them His, but in our making them 
His to make Himself ours. In becoming coworkers, 
co-creators with God, we make ourselves one with and 
partakers of God Himself. 

The impulse to discredit or destroy institutions that 
go back beyond all memory or knowledge of man — 
such, for example, as that of marriage — because of 
imperfections or failures or abuses, instead of reading 
their slowly unfolding meaning, and looking forward 
and patiently working up to their future ideal perfec- 
tion, however far oJBF, is an impatience incapable of 
cooperation with Him to whom a thousand years are 
as one day. The divine intent of marriage, as we have 
seen, is the highest ideal of human relation and asso- 
ciation, of social purity and perfection. Discredit of 
it, leading inevitably to corruption in it, is poison at 
the root of human life. 

The truth we are trying to carry along with us is, 
that life or salvation is not away from the natural to 
the spiritual, but through and by the natural into the 
spiritual. We are not to love God instead of our 
neighbor or heaven instead of earth, but to love God 
in our neighbor and make heaven out of earth. If 
we have not loved the visible, how shall we love the 
invisible? If we have not been faithful in the earthly, 



Divine Love in Human Service 119 

we will not be so in the heavenly: "If ye have not been 
faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit 
to your trust the true riches? " Human life grows up, 
or is built up, from the ground; it needs to get the 
proper good of all its stages, in order to have its com- 
plete and perfect good in the end. 

Moral good originates in and is identical with social 
good. If goodness is the will of the good, then, since 
goodness is itself the highest good, it is the will of 
itself: just as the highest love is the love of Love, so 
the most perfect goodness is the will, not merely of 
good, but of that completest good which is goodness. 
It is the will of goodness, not alone in ourselves, but 
everywhere and in all: we have shown that true egoism 
and true altruism, true self-love and true other-love, 
are not two, much less inconsistent and discordant, 
but one and inseparable. We are to love other as we 
love ourself: we are indeed to love other as ourself: 
we are to take the other into ourself, and to seek and 
find ourself in the other. So God loves us, and so 
He bids us love Him — Himself in us, and ourselves 
in Him. He and we are all members one of another 
in a common life. 

Life is organized, as we have seen, on social lines and 
exists only in the fulfilment of social relations. It is 
born in union and perfected in unity. That is why 
God is Love, and all life is love: because love is the 
only real and perfect bond or principle of union and 
unity. The most elemental, earthly, human life rests 
upon that sole foundation. "Man," says Aristotle, 



120 The Reason of Life 

"is a political, or social, animal" — that is his first 
word, the seed of all his subsequent discourse about 
him. And he shows elsewhere that the one ideal 
perfect bond of society — that which lies before, be- 
hind, and within all mere justice or righteousness, the 
soul and life of all virtue or virtues — would be a 
universal philia, his nearest approach to that Love 
which, over three hundred years after, our Lord came 
into the world to make the realized and actual bond of 
all human life. 

Natural relations, associations, intercourses, mutual 
oflBces, duties and services, are the cradle, the nursery, 
the school, the gymnasium for any and all human life 
that may come after, here or elsewhere. Our Lord 
began His divine oflSice upon earth with the humblest 
ministrations to the bodies of the poor, the diseased, 
the repulsive, the ungrateful and undeserving. Almost 
His last act was to wash the disciples' feet, and to bid 
them go forth into the world and be in it and to it 
what He was, the servant of all. When at the last 
they should come before Him to receive His verdict 
upon what their life upon earth had taught and made 
them, the test and the testimony would be, "Had they 
been faithful in the little, and to the little.^ Then 
would they be accepted as faithful unto Him, and in 
the much." "Had they fed the poor, clad the naked, 
visited the sick and the prisoner? What they had 
done to these they had done to Him:" Service 
rendered to love was rendered to God, and God 
would recognize or accept none other. 



Divine Love in Human Service 121 

Religion begins with the simplest, the humblest, and 
the most earthly of duties and offices, and if it does 
not find God in these, it will not find Him elsewhere. 
Life is service or nothing with God; and service, like 
God, is no respecter of persons. God wants the service 
for the sake of the server, the servant, as well as the 
served. It is infinitely more to Him that we should 
serve than that He Himself should be served. He can 
dispense with our service, but it is our breath and our 
life: only in it have we Him; only in doing His work 
of love are we sharing His life of love, and enjoying the 
blessedness of it. 

Life is more a service, and a more divine service, 
when we recognize and love it as such; but whether 
we know it or not, or will it or not, it is still so as a 
matter of fact, and we cannot well live it otherwise. 
It is remarkable how universally — and in spite of our- 
selves — we acknowledge the truth in terms, even when 
we are the most thoroughly contradicting it in spirit 
and intention. Among all the avocations or occupa- 
tions by which men earn their living, and in which 
they practically live their lives, there is probably not 
one which does not in some way avow or proclaim 
itself a service. In the necessary division and subdi- 
vision of labor in every community, there is no way 
of living for one's individual self except through some 
sort of service of the community. To what an extent 
life is collective and organic, or social, and not individ- 
ual or particular, we find it difficult to realize, for the 
simple reason that we dwell so much more upon the 



122 The Reason of Life 

little that is ours exclusively than upon the very much 
that is ours only inclusively or in common with others. 
It is literally true that '*no man liveth unto himself": 
either he is not living "unto himself," or he is not 
"living." 

The most selfish and dishonest politician is obliged 
to claim or profess that he "serves" a constituency. 
He is avowedly in the public service, however he may 
be using it for private ends or gain. No one denies 
in terms, however he may contradict it in acts, that 
"public office is a public trust." But it is so, not only 
with public office, but with any kind of public business: 
why should certain large organizations or combina- 
tions of capital style themselves "Trusts.^^" There is 
no business that does not use habitually the language 
of service: the merchant "serves" his customers, the 
insurance company its patrons, the lawyer his clients, 
the doctor his patients, the master his pupils. Lower 
down in the scale of service we distinctly apply the 
title " servants," but who in the universal occupation 
or business of living or of life is not a servant? 

Our Lord did not come into the world to make life 
diflEerent so much as to make it real — to make it 
what it must be, what it cannot but be, if it is to be life 
indeed. St. John says of Him, that He was not come 
to give us a new commandment, but to put grace and 
truth, spirit and power and reality, into the old com- 
mandment which was from the beginning. 

In human life, as it is constituted by nature, every 
act of real service is equally a service to others and to 



Divine Love in Human Service 123 

ourselves. In the highest as in the lowest sense a man 
"makes his living," lives his life, by service. In 
every act of service there are two elements, motive 
or purpose, and consequence or result. When we 
speak of the end of an action, we may mean by it 
either the conscious intention, or the actual effect 
of the action. The law of these two, the true relation 
and proportion that ought to exist between them, 
may be the discovery or revelation, it is not the 
creation or invention of Christianity. No revela- 
tion of life to us is true because it is revealed, it is 
revealed because it is true. It is no truth of Chris- 
tianity that a man's life or self is not to be an 
end to him. The end and motive of Christianity is 
not self-extinction, but self-realization. We are not 
to extinguish desire, but rather "to desire earnestly 
the best gifts." The self or personality in Jesus Christ 
is not reduced to zero but raised to infinity, exalted to 
participation with God. Nevertheless it is a fact and 
a law in self-realization, that the less self appears in 
the motive the more it is found in the result of all 
human action, and the more in the motive the less in 
the result. That is, the more in any kind of service 
we are seeking ourselves, the less we are in reality serv- 
ing ourselves, ''He that seeketh his life shall lose it; 
and he that loseth his life for my sake (that is, he 
who most truly goes out of or beyond himself in 
others) shall find it." 

This seems plain enough to us in the highest reaches 
of service and sacrifice: it is certainly in losing oneself 



124 The Reason of Life 

in the cause of God and in the interests of humanity 
that one attains the highest selfhood and enjoys the 
purest satisfactions. No one will deny a generality 
like that, but the question is, Is the principle true and 
applicable and practicable in all, even the lowest, de- 
tails of our earthly life? We might take any particu- 
lar business of life, from the lowest to the highest, and 
apply to it such questions as the following: Who 
makes, even here, the truest success of his business and 
of himself, the man who plies the business with the 
most selfish motive of himself and his own gain, or the 
man who, with equal purpose and devotion, plies it 
for its own high sake as a service, and for the sake of 
those whom he is serving in it? As a matter of fact, 
the common judgment and sentiment of the world, 
always so far beyond and above its actual working 
principle and practice, suflBciently answers that ques- 
tion. Its verdict of truth, of nobility, of heroism in 
action or conduct or character, turns immediately, if 
not exclusively, upon the relative proportion in the 
motive of self-seeking or of other-regarding. We know 
always what to love and admire in others, what to 
celebrate or commemorate, however little we may 
value or live by it in ourselves. All natural heroism 
or nobility is identical in principle with the loving, 
self-sacrificing service of Jesus Christ to God and 
humanity. He came not into the world to institute a 
new principle or law of human life, but to be the resur- 
rection and regeneration of the old and the only. Even 
the non-Christian world's verdict of approval and 



Divine Love in Human Service 125 

apotheosis upon Jesus Christ turns upon the recogni- 
tion of the fact that "He loved not Himself unto the 
death." Those words express, not only the perfection 
of law to the followers of our Lord, but the limit of 
natural perfection for humanity. 

"I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me." The 
Apostle interprets the lifting up to be that of the cross : 
**this He said, signifying by what death He should die." 
It was assuredly not the literal cross that was the 
lifting up, but that of which the cross has been made 
by Him the permanent and expressive symbol — the 
spirit and principle of life and action which, when car- 
ried out to its limit, brings humanity into oneness with 
deity. Perfect love is the only at-one-ment. There 
is a very high sense, the very highest, in which it is 
true that all the world loves Love, and cannot but love 
the Lover: "I, if I be lifted up (lifted up by that 
principle and motive, and to that height, of self- 
sacrificing love and service), will draw all men unto 
me." The world, when it knows, cannot but respond 
to that expectation and prophecy. Because He was 
infinitely obedient to the one divine spirit and law of 
love, because He loved not Himself unto the death of 
the cross — "therefore God exalted Him and gave 
Him the name that is above every name." And there- 
fore also, for that same reason — "At the name of 
Jesus every knee will bow, of things in heaven, of 
things in earth, and things under the earth, and every 
tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the 
glory of God the Father." 



XI 

CHRISTIANITY THE UNIVERSAL MINISTRY 

OF LIFE 

The irresistible and inevitable progress of human 
society, in all its forms, is from monarchy to democracy. 
Intelligence, with all its growing activities and powers, 
diffuses itself downward and outward from the one or 
the few to the many: its aim cannot stop short of all. 
Life in all its stretches and reaches must lie open to all 
who would explore its deepest recesses or essay its 
highest attainments. Human thought and will, in no 
part of it, can be kept in nonage, under guardians and 
stewards, forever. In spiritual things as in natural, 
the world is demanding that authority must meet and 
carry with it consent. ' The order and unity of the 
authority of one, is of course an easier and simpler 
thing than that of the consent of all; but the question 
is, is it a better thing .^^ And the better, and best, has 
to be sooner or later pursued through whatever of 
confusion and pain and difficulty. At any rate the 
easier thing has passed away from among us forever, 
and will never be possible again; the harder thing lies 
before us. 

The end of Christianity is the unity of human life 
with Christ in God. The ideal — by which we must 

126 



Universal Ministry of Life 127 

mean the ultimate, final actual, the end and goal of 
the present imperfect actual — is not the unity of or 
under a head outside and over us; even though the head 
be Christ Himself. The only true head of a body is 
that which is equally the life and intelligence of every 
part and particle of the body. The aim of the Church, 
which is the Body of Christ, is to be equally alive in its 
every part, in all the abundance of His all-sufficing 
life. This does not mean that there is not to be dif- 
ferentiation of functions and division of labor. It does 
mean the unity and consent of a life which, though dis- 
tributed through parts, is one and is equally the life of 
the whole body. 

The desideratum of Christianity, then, is that every 
individual member of the body, in his place and part, 
shall be and shall know himself actually and always 
engaged in the general life and work of Christ. This 
is practicable and possible only through a very much 
larger appreciation and realization than we now have 
of the universality and inclusiveness of the life and 
work of Christ. 

A great and important phase and practical working 
out of this question is ju^t now presented to us in the 
"Laymen's Movement " going on throughout our coun- 
try and more or less affecting the entire Christian world. 
What is the immediate meaning of this movement, 
and in what permanent form or forms are its aspirations 
going to be expressed and satisfied? The principle 
seeking expression in it is that the work of Christ, that 
work which He came into the world to accomplish. 



128 The Reason of Life 

and the actual accomplishing of which was to be His 
witness in and to the world — that work of Christ is 
the work of the Church, and is waiting upon the Church 
for its accomplishment. That first — and, secondly, 
that the work of the Church is the work of the whole 
Church, and can be made so only by its becoming the 
work of every member of the Church. It is absurd to 
suppose that Christ is going to be a presence and a 
power upon the earth, unless the Church will wake up 
and become a power and a reality for Him — seeing 
that the Church is the Body of His presence and the 
instrument and organ of His power. And it is equally 
absurd to think of a living body in which all the mem- 
bers, the least as well as the most prominent parts, are 
not alive and performing their proper functions. If 
the life of Christ is to be the life of all, then the work of 
Christ must be work for all: faculty without function, 
life without work, is dead — in fact, is death. ^ 

If, coextensive with Church life, there is to be Church 
work for all, then we must broaden and enlarge our 
conception of what is Church work; for hitherto the 
body of the Church, apart from a very limited number 
of differentiated and specialized "workers," has found 
nothing really to do. We must first widen Christian 
or Church work to include all that is done in Christ, 
or in the name and in the spirit of Christ; and then we 
must expand what is done in Christ into "all things 
that pertain to life and godliness." Christianity in- 
cludes all life in Christ — not only some, or a part. 
As all comes from Him in creation, so He aims to enter 



Universal Ministry of Life 129 

into all by incarnation. He shares all with us, and 
ministers to all in us — the life of body as well as soul. 
We cannot, except in the abstraction of thought, sever 
the continuity that runs through and unifies all life, 
from the lowest material up to the highest spiritual. 
So Christ's mission and ministry was to men's body 
and bodily life; the heaven He brought and preached 
was a heaven upon earth; the kingdom He set up was 
God's spirit of love, service, and sacrifice to be man- 
ifested and exercised by men among men in the world. 
All the work of Christ is work to be done here and now. 
Wherever and however life is lived and service ren- 
dered in the name and in the spirit of Christ, there 
Christ is in the life and in the service. We cannot be 
or do in Him, without His also being and doing in us. 
When then the layman asks what of Christian or of 
Church work there is for him to do, and ends by finding 
none, it is the most fatal of mistakes to leave him in 
the conclusion that there is none for him except as he 
can take some quasi-part in the oflBcial or professional 
work of the distinctive ministry. What he needs to 
do is simply to make his own lawful and useful business 
or profession, whatever it may be, a work and his work 
for Christ. Let him be doing it " in Christ," in the name 
and in the spirit of Christ, and Christ will be doing it in 
him and making it an integral and necessary part of 
the work He is Himself on the earth to accomplish. 
He did not spend His time upon earth ministering only 
to men's supermundane interests or teaching a heaven 
elsewhere or hereafter; He brought God and heaven 
10 



130 The Reason of Life 

down into hearts and lives and conditions here — 
where they are most needed and therefore best ac- 
quired. 

I do not mean that laymen are not, upon occasion, 
and when qualified as many of them are, and more 
ought to be, to be interested and take part in ministra- 
tions and services which are now too exclusively made 
the business and left to the care of the clergy. A living 
laity will help and relieve the clergy in many ways, and 
leave them freer for the more essential parts of their 
special ministry. But the mistake is in supposing that 
the special so-called or " proper" ministry is the whole 
Ministry of Christ, and that one must intrude into that 
in order to be exercising a ministry or doing Church 
work. Whereas every Christian is not only a minister 
but a missionary for Christ, and has his own work and 
mission to accomplish. And inasmuch as there is no 
real business upon earth which is not in fact a service 
of God and man, it follows that one has only to follow 
the apostolic injunction, "whatsoever we do in word or 
deed, to do all in the name of the Lord Jesus," in order 
to know and feel that one is doing Christian and Church 
work. There is not a man or woman in Christ who 
ought not to — and, as they truly realize the meaning 
and the fact of being in Christ, will not — say with our 
Lord, and as our Lord, '*The work which the Father 
hath given me to accomplish, the work that I do, 
beareth witness of me, that He hath sent me." 

We have seen that theVe is no living business, or 
business of life, that does not profess in terms to be 



Universal Ministry of Life 131 



some form or part of that service" or ministry" for 
which the Son of Man Himself professed to be come 
into the world. There is no normal means of one's 
own livelihood which is not properly and professedly 
a service of others as well as of self. We have seen 
that the actual eflEectiveness as well as the moral and 
personal worth, the benefit to self as well as the common 
good, of all service rendered, is even by the world's 
judgment measured by the degree in which seK is sunk 
out of sight in the motive, to reappear unsought and 
exalted in the reflex result. "Wherefore God highly 
exalted Him" — but God exalted Him only through 
His own act, and so alone He exalts us: it is always 
the act itseK that exalts us, and ourselves through the 
act. But the law of the process is, that he most exalts 
himself who, with least thought of self, identifies him- 
self with and attains his highest and truest self in unity 
with others and so with God. 

Now this process of self-finding through self-losing, 
of making one's own life as well as one's mere livelihood 
through living in and for others, is as possible and 
practicable in one avocation as in another. "The 
Ministry," professionally so-called, is no more exclu- 
sively the service or ministry of Christ upon earth 
than any other natural and necessary form of living 
for others. Anything done in love, for the help and 
furtherance of life, is an actual and material part 
of the ministry of Jesus Christ, so it be done in His 
spirit and in His name. All life is His and is He: 
in His incarnation He enters into it all, in order that 



132 The Reason of Life 

by knowing Him in it we may have it more person- 
ally and more abundantly. 

The man who tills the ground as an act of service to 
God, and in order that it may bring forth fruit for man, 
who realizes and feels that he is ministering directly 
to the most elemental needs and wants of human life 
— working with Christ that men may have life, and 
have it more freely and abundantly — will in the first 
place be a better tiller of the ground than he who sees 
nothing in his labor but the material betterment of 
himself. He will increase even his most temporal gains 
and condition by the higher conception of himself and 
his work, but what other and truer gains will he not 
add to himself, if he will in even his most menial tasks 
and toil see himself a coworker with God and with 
Christ, an actual steward of God and minister of Christ 
in the producing and dispensing of life! So no less 
with any and every other worker in the varied but 
universal and all-employing business of life. Our Lord 
was no less engaged in His ministry when He was healing 
the leper than when He was saving the sinner; and 
why should the physician of bodies be less a minister 
of Christ than the physician of souls? Will the physi- 
cian be a less good or successful one in any, even the 
lowest sense or respect, if his practice is one of love, ser- 
vice, and sacrifice, and not merely (though that too) for 
what the world calls "a living".^ Who is the truly 
great lawyer? — he who is the public-spirited and 
incorruptible servant of justice and humanity, a minister 
of Christ and with Christ for the equity and integrity 



Universal Ministry of Life 133 

of social and corporate life, or he who uses his profession 
as a facile and powerful instrument or tool for the 
furtherance and protection of selfish interests? 

The point is, If Christ's work upon earth was and is 
the universal and all-inclusive ministry of life, and 
includes "all things that pertain to life and godliness," 
and if the whole spirit and principle and law of life and 
godliness is expressed in the three distinctive Christian 
terms. Love, Service, Sacrifice — then who that is 
engaged in the business of life (as who properly is not?) 
is excluded by his occupation from that ministry? 
When the laity of the Church come together in a body, 
from which there should be no exclusions, to enquire 
what they can be actively and constantly doing for 
Christ — what shall be the answer? I am very far 
from saying that no man shall go outside of his own 
special business in search of Christian service, for no 
man should be a mere specialist, and it is well to be 
called out of our own routine, and there are needs and 
occasions enough for help in others. But I do say that 
no man need go outside his own business to find work 
for Christ and His Church, and that his first and most 
constant and urgent call is to make his own business 
distinctively and avowedly the ministry and the mission 
he is in search of. If it cannot be made so, or ought not 
to be made so, then it is not a legitimate and an honest 
business. For, I repeat, all life is in Christ, and Christ 
desires to be in all life; what cannot and ought not to 
be in Him is not life. 

It so happened that the above words were in writing 



134 The Reason of Life 

when the writing was interrupted by the duties of 
Good Friday, but with no thought at the time of the 
services for that day, on which our Lord sealed with 
His death His Ufe of unbroken love, service, and sacri- 
fice. It may be supposed that the following prayer in 
the service on that day came into mind with a peculiar 
force: "Almighty and Everlasting God, by whose 
Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and 
sanctified, Receive our supplications and prayers, which 
we offer before Thee for all estates of men in Thy holy 
Church, that every member of the same in his vocation 
and ministry may truly and godly serve Thee, through 
our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ!" Who is there in 
God's holy Church without his own " vocation and 
ministry "? And what is there in any one vocation 
and ministry that is not in essence in all? The Son 
of Man is the truth and life of every man: and every 
man is in Him "not to be served but to serve, not 
to be ministered to but to minister, and to give his 
life for many." 

It so happened also, that at the very time of the writ- 
ing of these thoughts the following words appeared in 
the current number of a religious weekly: "The spirit 
of business, at its best and highest, is the spirit of service. 
No business can prosper permanently that does not 
find its basis and its reason for existence in rendering 
service to those whom it seeks to reach. There is of 
course a great deal of business done which is selfish in 
its purpose and intentions. But there is also a great 
deal of business conducted by men who, as consecrate 



Universal Ministry of Life 135 

disciples of Jesus Christ, are using their energies and 
their business abilities in the spirit of a stewardship 
that is responsible to Christ." 

There is no reason why good business, business con- 
ducted in a Christian spirit and upon Christian prin- 
ciples, should not be profitable business, in even the 
worldly sense. Whatever makes it good or better 
will naturally make it profitable and more so. It is 
not good or better, for example, that business should 
be conducted " for charity," as we use the expres- 
sion. If we are conducting our business upon right 
principles of real service, willing and doing good in 
the best sense to those with whom we deal, we will 
not exercise our virtue at the expense of theirs; and 
the charity which may be the moral good of the 
doer or donor, we know has too often been the moral 
weakening and injury of the recipient. The truest 
principle of business, that which best works the total 
good which Christianity is in the world to accomplish, 
is fair and equal exchange. There is room enough 
and need enough for true and helpful charity, without 
injurious interference with justice and righteousness. 

When our Lord bids us "seek first His kingdom and 
His righteousness," with the promise that the other 
things "shall be added to us," neither the kingdom nor 
the righteousness of which He speaks is a thing apart 
from our life and business in this world. How can 
righteousness originate or exist or appear apart from 
relations and interchanges of life, from business dealings 
and associations? It is amid occasions and opportuni- 



136 The Reason of Life ' 

ties and temptations of wrongness that Tightness ap- 
pears over against and in contrast with it, in conflict 
with and triumph over it. But even righteousness, in 
and of itself, is but a formal notion, a law and nothing 
more. As a mere expression and rule of obligation it is 
a body without a soul. That which gives it content 
or motive or life is the spirit of Love. There is nothing 
essentially and eternally right but love, the will of good 
to all; there is no actual or real love but service, the 
doing good to all; there is no true service but sacrifice, 
the spending of life and self in the service of all. That 
is God, that is Christ, that is the Holy Ghost, that is 
Christianity, that is the ministry, the priesthood, of 
every Christian man and woman. 

And this ministry is best exercised in just that place 
and part which is each man's business in the necessary 
division and subdivisions of the labor of life. It is 
his part and place in the universal and the eternal, 
his life as one with that of God and of Jesus Christ. 
Where the parts are all in the whole, the Whole is in 
each of the parts. We are seeking God's kingdom and 
righteousness first, when we put the Whole which is 
God above the part which is ourself . 

When St. Paul bids us " set our minds upon the things 
that are above, not upon the things that are upon the 
earth," he is not preaching " other-worldliness." The 
things that are above are as much with us, if our mind 
is set upon them, as the things that are upon the earth. 
If our daily business and dealings and duties and cares 
are all what they ought to be, and as they ought to be. 



Universal Ministry of Life 137 

then the kingdom of God and His righteousness are as 
truly in them as the promised issue of "what we shall 
eat and drink, or wherewithal we shall be clothed." 
And the more truly we put the first things first, the 
safer we shall be from lacking the last. 



XII 
FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD 

Human Life, as it is the subject matter of Christian- 
ity, may — and indeed must — be studied from oppo- 
site points of view, accordingly as we treat it as our 
life in God or as the life of God in us. The human life 
of Jesus Christ Himself must be viewed, separately if 
not independently, in those two aspects. He was son 
of David, of Abraham, of Adam, Son of Man, as well 
as Son of God; and in His former character or capacity 
His life was subject to all the conditions, laws, and 
processes that belong to human life in general. There 
was a natural evolution of human spirituality, as of 
everything else that is human, from Adam, through 
Abraham and David, to Jesus. Our Lord humanly 
becomes Son of God through every link and moment 
of the process by which it is necessary that man should 
become son of God. Genealogically He was born of a 
progressively spiritual ancestry, and only in the fulness 
of time. Individually or personally He becomes son of 
God by human act and in the human way, as well as 
is Son of God in divine fact. St. Paul, on the whole, 
more clearly conceives Christ in the aspect of human 
author of a divine sonship and righteousness; St. 
John in the aspect of divine revealer and imparter of 

138 



Fellowship with God 139 

divine sonship and life. Similarly we must regard 
our own spiritual life as, in one aspect, a human evo- 
lution and inheritance, and a personal act and attain- 
ment of our own, though wrought only in God; and, 
in another aspect, a direct revelation and communi- 
cation to us from God in Jesus Christ. How to com- 
bine these two aspects of one and the same thing is 
the truth and task of Christianity. 

The First Epistle of St. John may be taken as a 
dissertation upon the life of God as it is revealed in and 
imparted to humanity. He begins with The Life as 
it is first manifested in Jesus Christ. There is no, or 
little, allusion to how our Lord Himself becomes what 
He is in our humanity; He is simply, in his spiritual 
human perfection, what God reveals or manifests 
Himself in humanity: what He wills and purposes, if 
we will, to become in us all. The Apostle describes 
the manifested Life in terms, not alone of a natural 
witness who had had every sensible evidence and 
experience of the external and historical facts involved, 
but no less of a spiritual witness who, as fully as any 
other, apprehended the deeper import and significance 
of those facts. He sees the life that has come down 
from God perfected and glorified in Man; and in full 
confidence and assurance of participation himseK in 
that life, he goes forth, in the joy of it, to complete his 
joy by making all others partakers of it. "We declare 
it unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us; 
yea, and our fellowship is with the Father, and with 
His Son Jesus Christ." 



140 The Reason of Life 

The first question for us, is as to the meaning and 
reality of that fellowship or koinonia, in which the life 
is to consist. What is it of God, or rather, what is God 
Himself, that we can share with Him? The answer 
is: that God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at 
all. Among the many possible explanations of the 
meaning of " light " in this connection, we may consider 
the following: The light is not alone that of the intel- 
ligence, as Truth; it is equally of the feeling or aflPec- 
tion, as Love; and of the will and life, as Holiness and 
Righteousness. We might say that "light" is simply a 
synonym for " truth," if we include in " truth " that, 
not only of thought or knowledge, but also of feeling or 
affection, and of will and action. These are the three 
constituent elements of ourselves, and in each there is 
a true and a possible false, or light and darkness. The 
truth of intelligence is " the right reason," wisdom, the 
knowledge of things as they are. The truth of affec- 
tion or feeling is love, the right feeling for, the right 
pleasure or happiness in the right things. The truth 
of the will and activity is true freedom, the obedience 
of the whole life to the law of truth and love. Thus 
Light is the unity of the three prismatic hues or aspects 
of human life, knowledge or wisdom, love, and obedi- 
ence or righteousness. Of these, love is the central and 
chief: it is the substance and content of the other two. 
In a sense it alone is real, and not merely formal. 
Knowledge is of " the things that are," independently 
of what the things are — good or bad. Obedience is 
conformity to a law, equally independently of what 



Fellowship with God 141 

the law is. Love is wish and will, not possibly of any 
thing else, but only of *' the good." To wish or will 
evil, for oneself or for another, is not to love but to hate. 

In consonance with this, it is evident that in the 
Epistle, Light is used in all the meanings of Truth, 
Love, and Obedience; and that Love is at once the 
content of Truth, the reality to be known, the " Thing 
that Is " in the universe; and the object or law of 
Obedience: it was to the law of love that Jesus was 
obedient unto death, and that the death of the cross: 
love is the spirit and life of all righteousness. 

We come thus to the main question of our koinonia 
or fellowship with God, and here there is a matter of 
interpretation to be first considered. "God is Light; 
if, therefore, we say that we have fellowship with Him, 
and are walking in the darkness (of ignorance, or hate, 
or sin), we lie and do not the truth. But if we are 
walking in the light, even as He is in the light, then have 
we fellowship one with another." The point is, Who 
are the " one another" in this relation: who are the two 
parties to the fellowship? If we suffer ourselves simply 
to follow the argument or course of thought, it would 
seem that the two parties are ourselves and God. If 
our not walking in the light, which is God, be evidence 
that we are not in God, or in participation with God, 
who is light, then the fact that we are in the light is 
proof that we are in God, or that God and we are in 
fellowship with one another. The Apostle had already 
affirmed that our fellowship is with the Father and 
with His Son Jesus Christ. This does not exclude the 



142 The Reason of Life 

subordinate and consequent truth that participation 
with God is necessarily participation with one another 
in God. In the case of the Apostle, fellowship with 
God impels him instantly to the further and completing 
truth and joy of fellowship with the brethren: "that 
ye also may have fellowship with us, . . . that our 
joy may be fulfilled." God in us would mean infi- 
nitely less to us if it did not mean God in all, and 
all in one another. 

What, then, have we, or what are we, in common 
with God? This cannot but include or involve the 
previous question. What is our natural or metaphysi- 
cal kinship or relationship with God? Because there 
can be no transcendent interchange of relations with 
God, if there is no immanent basis of relationship with 
Him. Without oneness of nature, there can be no 
oneness of communion or intercourse. And such in- 
deed is our natural kinship with God that we cannot 
know or think either except in terms of the other. As 
we have seen, we know ourselves only under the cate- 
gories of thought, feeling, and will or action; our 
"self," or personality, is a compound and unity of in- 
telligence, affection, and volition and action. Now 
what is God? He is infinite or omniscient intelligence, 
or Wisdom; He is infinite or perfect affection, or Love; 
He is infinite or omnipotent activity, or Righteousness 
and Goodness. Is it not true that God is the Infinite 
of what we are, and that we are the finite of what God 
is? The first word of religion is the recognition of the 
fact that we are in the image of God. To know God 



Fellowship with God 143 

at all we have to know ourselves; to know ourselves 
unto perfection, we have to know God. To be our- 
selves unto perfection, we have to be what God is. 
It is a natural and metaphysical fact that we "do not 
the truth," that we are not the truth of ourselves, are 
not our real selves, until we walk in the light, and are 
what God is. There is no other end or limit or goal 
for man than God. What we want from Him is noth- 
ing less than Himself, seeing that He is our own and 
only perfect Self. 

But the truth which St. John is enunciating is not 
an immanent but a transcendent one, not a fact of 
nature but a revelation and impartation of grace. Or, 
if these are essentially the same, it is as one and not 
as the other that they are here under consideration. 
If it is our nature, or in our nature, to be saved and 
completed only in God, it is not only in our nature, or 
in our only immanent and natural relation to God, 
that we shall be saved and completed. God will have 
to make Himself and ourselves known to us by a tran- 
scendent act of Self revelation and impartation, before 
we can realize either Himself in us or ourselves in Him. 
That, too, is a metaphysical necessity: it is essential 
to our very being as persons, as finite spirits and chil- 
dren of God, reproduction and image of Himself, that 
what we shall be we shall be of ourselves. That is to 
say, what we are to be must be matter of our knowl- 
edge, our choice, and our action, if there is to be any 
selfhood in it for us, or we are to accomplish and 
become ourselves through it. 



144 The Reason of Life 

It is therefore not as God is in us in nature, but as He 
is in us in Jesus Christ, by Self revelation and imparta- 
tion on His part, and by faith and personal appropria- 
tion on our part, that we are here described as having 
with Him something more than is adequately described 
by the term " fellowship," and for which I would 
retain the original koinonia. That evidently expresses 
more than association or communion with another: 
the two are no longer two, but are become one. It 
means more than sharing something with God: what 
we share with Him is Himself; when we have truth, 
and love, and righteousness or goodness, we have God. 
Love is both Truth and Righteousness, because Love 
is God — not merely That which Is, but the essential 
and eternal I Am. 

When we say that "Our fellowship is with the 
Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ," we mean that 
we become one with the Father in the Son — that in 
the sonship to God, realized for us by Christ, God has 
become to us Father, and we have become to Him sons. 
The time has come when we may settle by reconciling a 
controversy which has given rise, not only to rival 
schools of thought, but to rival types of life. The 
question has been. Whether we are children of God by 
nature, or only become children of God by grace — 
whether we are so by birth, or only by regeneration or 
new birth — by immanent fact or by transcendent act. 
Both are true, and neither is truth apart from the 
other. The confusion or contradiction arises from not 
realizing that sonship is both a natural and a personal 



Fellowship with God 145 

or spiritual relationship; that it partly is, as a fact, 
and partly must become, as an act. "Because we are 
sons" — that may be taken as a fact of nature; 
"God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, 
crying, Abba, Father" — that was an act of grace. 
The immanent or natural fact would come to naught, 
that is, would never be spiritually realized and actual- 
ized in us, without the transcendent and personal act: 
what is the relation of son, without the spirit and life 
of sonship? Regeneration then presupposes natural 
sonship, and natural sonship is only the ground or 
condition, the potentiality for regeneration or realized 
sonship, and is incomplete without it. Because we 
are sons of God by nature, therefore we must become 
sons of God by grace through faith, that is, by the 
Spirit of God working in and with and through 
ourselves. 

As a matter of mere Scripturalness, or the point of 
view of the New Testament, the position of sonship 
by grace rather than by nature has the stronger 
argument. Sonship by nature is only a postulate or 
presupposition of historic Christianity, which is imme- 
diately concerned rather with the realization of hu- 
manity through spiritually accomplished sonship in 
Jesus Christ, than with the unrealized sonship of hu- 
manity in Adam — that is, in mere nature or in itself. 
Jesus Christ is regenerate or spiritual humanity, as 
Adam or primitive man is the symbol of natural or 
unregenerated humanity. The sequence and connec- 
tion of truth in this matter may be illustrated by what 
11 



146 The Reason of Life 

seems to be the meaning of an obscure passage in the 
Epistle before us. In Ch. II. 7, the Apostle is insisting 
that the truth of which he writes is no new truth, but 
the old truth that was from the beginning. But, again, 
he declares, it is new: because it has been made truth 
in Jesus, and in Him has become truth for us. Now 
apply this to our sonship to God: in a partial sense it 
is an old fact which has been from the beginning. But 
in the better part of its truth — in its realization and 
actualization — it has become what it never was 
before, and is new. 

Quite as important as the truth of regeneration in 
Christ, is the question of its mode — or "way," as our 
Lord Himself calls it. It is not enough to say that it 
is by grace through faith, unless we understand some- 
thing of the process of each of these. And first with 
regard to grace and its mode of operation: Grace is 
indeed a species of power, inasmuch as it is an eflBcient 
cause producing a definite effect. But it is a species 
widely differentiated from mere power, or from power 
necessarily or inseparably connected with its effect. 
Grace is never bare operation: it is effectual coopera- 
tion. The subjects of grace are only those in whom 
its working is in and with and through their own work- 
ing. The perfection of the operation of divine grace 
in human cooperation is manifest in Him who could 
say: "I and my Father are one:" "My will is His and 
His is mine; my works are, of course, mine; and yet 
not mine, but His in me." The paradox of divine grace 
can never, any more than that of human freedom in 



Fellowship with God 147 

general, be elucidated in logic, while yet it is indispu- 
table in experience. The divine is present and efficient 
in the human, while the human maintains all its in- 
tegrity and acts freely in the divine; so that one and 
the same act is both human and divine; as, altogether, 
in our Lord one and the same person is both human and 
divine. The cooperation is not the semi-pelagian one 
in which each side does so much, in different parts; it 
is rather that of the hypostatic union, in which each 
does all, in perfect union, or unity, with the other. 
The human manifests itself in no positive independence 
of the divine, but only negatively in the power of non- 
cooperation, and so in the freedom of its cooperation. 

Grace appeals thus to cooperation, and is ineffectual 
without it; otherwise it were not grace, but bare power. 
It can be resisted, grieved, and even quenched by the 
unpardonable sin of final rejection: "How would I, 
and ye would not!" And how can the appeal for co- 
operation be made to aught save intelligence, choice, 
and freedom; or otherwise than through all these? 
The essence of divine grace is divine Self-communi- 
cation: God gives us nothing less than Himself. And 
He can give us Himself, or we receive Him, only through 
our knowledge, love, acceptance and exercise of Him. 
Only through all these can we of ourselves become 
what He is; and we cannot be what He is without 
ourselves becoming it, because the being so through 
bare power, and not grace, would not in fact be we 
being so. 

I would not deny all truth to natural religion with- 



148 The Reason of Life 

out revelation: or, as I would express it, I would not 
deny a knowledge and service of God based upon 
mere inference from ourselves and the universe, and 
our immanent relation to Him, without transcendent 
communication from Him. I concede, on the contrary, 
that if there were no natural there could be no revealed 
religion. Natural religion is simply the potentiality 
and demand, of which revealed is the actuality and 
supply. 

But, while natural religion may give us a knowledge 
about God, it would not give us that knowledge of 
Him which is HimseH with us and in us, and which we 
have only in and through Jesus Christ. Nor can we 
see how otherwise that knowledge could have come to 
us than in Him who is at once God and we, God Him- 
self our holiness, our righteousness, and our life. In 
Jesus Christ we have at once that knowledge of our- 
selves which enables us to know God, and that knowl- 
edge of God which enables us to know ourselves. For, 
I repeat, we can neither know God at all save through 
what we finitely are, nor ourselves adequately save 
through what God infinitely is. In Jesus Christ we 
have the totality of religion realized — not in ourselves, 
for that were impossible in the beginning — but in Him 
as the object and end of our knowledge, our choice, 
and our will, of our faith, hope, and love, of all our 
doing, becoming, and real or essential being. How 
otherwise could God better, or at all, bring us into all 
that Himself is? 

As grace proceeds from the eternal love that God 



Fellowship with God 149 

Himself is, and reveals or communicates itself to us in 
the divine oneness with us that is Jesus Christ, so it 
manifests itself in us in that hainonia of ourselves with 
God in Christ, which is our present theme, and which 
is, in fact, the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost must, 
with equal truth, be spoken of as It and as He. As to 
what it is, when we speak of it as impersonal spirit, 
it is that character or quality of divine Love, which is 
the sole principle of all unity, and order, and beauty, 
and goodness, and real or essential life. Hereby know 
we that we are of God, that we are in Him and He in 
us, that He and we are one — that He hath given us 
of His spirit: "We know that He abideth in us, by 
the spirit that He hath given us." 

If we have not what the Spirit is, we have not Him, 
and cannot know Who He is. If we have it, we have 
Him, and know that He is God. There is nothing in 
God that is merely impersonal. If Jesus Christ was 
the word or utterance, the revelation or manifestation 
of God to us, then He was the eternal Personal Word 
of God, who is Himself God to us. If the Holy Ghost 
is the spirit of God in us, the mind, disposition, and 
character of God become ours, then is He the eternal 
Personal Spirit of God, who is Himself God in us. Our 
word or our spirit may become detached from us, and 
become in others only they, and no longer we. We 
ourselves may, without detriment to them, be not 
merely absent, but even wholly extinct. But God's 
Word and God's Spirit are never detached from Him- 
self, but are always Himself both present and operative 



150 The Reason of Life 

in them. It is the worst of anthropomorphisms, to think 
or speak of God's acts or influences or operations as 
separate from HimseK, as ours are. It is the sin of a 
mere transcendentaUsm or deism, as the opposite ex- 
treme is the sin of a mere immanentaUsm or pantheism. 
The true theism is that which does full justice alike 
to the transcendence and the immanence of God. 

The life of God is represented, first, as coming down 
into us from God, in a series of stages; and secondly, 
as ascending up in us, into God, in an answering suc- 
cession of stages. Love in the Father becomes grace 
or divine Self-communication in the Son, and finally 
fellowship, or human participation in the divine, in the 
Holy Ghost, in whom the Spirit of God and the spirit 
of man are brought into a divine-human unity, which 
is Christ in us. The answering ascent on man's part 
is from faith, through hope or anticipative possession, 
up to and into love, which is actual or accomplished 
possession. Of course, in both series, love runs through 
all and underlies all. Just as grace and fellowship are 
only progressive means and operations of the self- 
imparting of love, so also faith and hope are but 
progressive ways and means on our part of our 
participation and growth in love. 

The process of faith, hope, and love may be described 
somewhat as follows : The life of God, to be really ours, 
must be ours of our own choice and of our own act. 
The "we," of personal quality and character, must be 
all in it. God gives us to have life in ourselves: the 
water He gives us becomes in us a well of life having its 



Fellowship with God 151 

source in us as well as in Him. Through faith, hope, 
and love, Christ becomes ourselves, and His Spirit our 
own. But the life of God thus becomes ours, not by a 
divine magic, but in a human process and order. God 
in Christ, by His Spirit, enters into us through the only 
personal channels of intelligence, affection, and voli- 
tion. We must know life, desire life, will and purpose 
life, before we can really or fully possess life. Even 
the earliest of these stages is indeed already a beginning 
of life, but it is very far off as yet from the end of it. 
Life must come to us first from without; it must be 
an object, before it can become a possession: we must 
know it without us before we can have it within us. 
And what is all important, we must know it without 
us as ours, in God's purpose, and by God's act, before 
we can possibly realize it as ours, in us and by our own 
act. Who will of himself conceive, or by his own act 
alone undertake, all that to which we are called of 
God in Christ Jesus? "Whom He foreknew, them 
He predestinates to be conformed to the image of His 
Son, that He might be the First only of many, or of 
all. Moreover, whom He predestinated He calls: 
Christ is the call to every man, to become what He is. 
The elect are the effectually called: that is, all who 
answer and obey the call. Those thus called He justi- 
fies: that is, He accepts as being, in grace and in faith, 
in Christ. And then, by His grace and through their 
faith, in Christ He progressively sanctifies and ulti- 
mately glorifies them." If God be thus for us, and 
with us, and in us — for us, eternally in Himself as 



152 The Reason of Life 

Father; with us, effectually in Jesus Christ as Son; in 
us, actually and in progressive assimilation on our 
part by the Holy Ghost, as the common Spirit of His 
and our life — if God be thus ours throughout the 
entire process of our attainment of life, what can be 
against us in it or disappoint us of it? How necessary 
is it that we should have this objective revelation to 
us of ourselves and our destiny, of the part of God in 
it, and of the part that waits and depends upon our- 
selves! How needful was the divine manifestation 
of human life in Jesus Christ — "for our sake, who 
through Him are believers in God, which raised Him 
from the dead and gave Him glory; so that our faith 
and hope might be in God!" "The greatness of His 
power to usward who believe" is measured for us 
by "the working of the strength of His might which He 
wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead." 
It is thus that the Holy Ghost in us is "the earnest 
of the promised possession." St. John says that we 
have "a chrism from the Holy One": what of the 
Spirit, or spirit, of God and of Christ is abidingly in us, 
as part of our life and character, is so much of Christ 
and of God in us, and is both potency and promise of 
all. Faith is of God and of God's part in our life; hope 
is of us and our part. It is only, as St. Paul teaches, in 
the tribulation of life, that endurance and perseverance 
and survival on our part works in us proof of the suffi- 
ciency of grace, and of our own power through it; and 
so faith passes on into hope, and through both love, 
the love of God, is fulfilled in us. 



Fellowship with God 153 

He who in the Son sees the Father, who in Jesus 
Christ recognizes the Life of God manifest upon earth, 
who by the Holy Ghost appropriates that Ufe to him- 
self and assimilates himself to it, has set to his seal 
that God is true. The truth of humanity answers unto 
and fits into the truth of God, and the unity of both is 
proof of the truth of each. He who denies God in 
Christ, by the lie in himself makes God a liar to him. 
For this is the witness of God: "that He hath given 
unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He 
that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the 
Son of God hath not the life." 



XIII 
CHRISTIANITY AS A WITNESS 

The last words of our Lord to His Apostles before 
His final taking up from among them were these: "Ye 
shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon 
you; and ye shall be my witnesses . . . unto the utter- 
most part of the earth." When the Holy Ghost was 
come upon them, the first testimony of the Apostles 
before the people was to this effect: "This Jesus hath 
God raised up, whereof — or, of Whom — we all are 
witnesses." And again, before the rulers: "Ye killed 
the Prince — or. Author — of life; whom God raised 
again from the dead, whereof — or, of Whom — we are 
witnesses." They everywhere emphasize their witness; 
and the ambiguity in the form of the pronoun only calls 
attention to the fact that Jesus and the resurrection are 
convertible, and to a certain extent identical terms: 
that testimony to the one is testimony to the other. 
Let us consider, first, the persons of the witnesses, and, 
secondly, the matter of the witness. 

We might limit the persons of the witnesses to the 
number of the Apostles. Unquestionably, they were 
the primary witnesses, chosen with special reference 
to that end. When there was a vacancy in their num- 
ber, they felt it necessary that "Of the men who had 

154 



Christianity as a Witness 155 

companied with them all the time that the Lord Jesus 
went in and out among them, beginning from the bap- 
tism of John, unto the day that He was received up 
from them, of these must one become a witness with 
them of the resurrection." Perhaps the claim is not 
unreasonable, that the Apostolate as a permanent in- 
stitution is a standing monument and witness of Jesus 
and the resurrection to the end of time, as well as to 
the ends of the earth. There can be no question that 
the Episcopate, whatever be the details of its origin, 
was from the beginning intended and looked upon as 
the instrument and expression of the unity and univer- 
sality — the catholicity — of Christianity, or of the 
Church, in both space and time. And what is either 
Christianity or the Church but the extension or uni- 
versal inclusiveness of Jesus and the Resurrection .^^ 

But witness to Jesus and the Resurrection was not 
limited to the Apostles, and certainly in no exclusive 
way has been transmitted through the Episcopate. 
There is a much deeper and truer sense in which all 
real Christians are witnesses, and Christianity itself is 
essentially the witness to Jesus and the resurrection. 
This will become apparent as we examine the witnesses 
more in connection with their witness. A large part 
of that witness was without doubt that of literal eye- 
witnesses to external and physical facts, historical 
incidents or events. Such, on one side of them, were 
certainly both Jesus and the resurrection. But if that 
were all, why — what possible reason or meaning could 
there be for — the promise, "Ye shall receive power. 



156 The Reason of Life 

when the Holy Ghost is come upon you," as the condi- 
tion of their becoming witnesses? Could anything more 
than sound senses, good memories, and common hon- 
esty be required for competent testimony to common 
facts? Is it not plain that these particular witnesses 
needed something more than physical or natural quali- 
fications for testimony to something more than physi- 
cal or natural facts? It was not enough, what they saw 
or heard with natural eyes and ears; the important 
point was, what they saw in what they saw, and heard 
through what they heard. When Jesus said, "He 
that heareth my words — " He by no means meant 
every one who had heard them with outward ears. 
"Take heed how ye hear" — were very solemn words 
in His mouth. "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father" — was very far from true of every one who 
had seen Him: there are very dififerent kinds of seeing. 
The function of the promised Holy Ghost was to be 
that He should "take of the things of Jesus, and show 
them unto us." He was to give us eyes to see, and ears 
to hear, and hearts to understand, and minds to know. 
The Holy Ghost in us is our subjective qualification 
to receive the things that be of God, and that are ad- 
dressed, not to our flesh, but to our spirit, to our sense 
for divine things. 

Let us illustrate by the actual witness of one of the 
chief witnesses. Why was St. John so chief a witness 
to Jesus and the resurrection? Not because he could 
better see or hear or report with outer senses or under- 
standing; but because he had the deeper inner vision. 



Christianity as a Witness 157 

and saw and heard what to others was invisible and 
inaudible. Hear his testimony: "What was from the 
beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen 
with our eyes, what we beheld, and our hands handled, 
concerning the word of life — what we have seen and 
heard declare we unto you." Every term is used, every 
qualification enumerated, of the purest external testi- 
mony, and yet it is evident that the thing testified to 
is accessible only to the most inner and spiritual senses 
or perception. All that our Lord had said or done on 
earth, all the wonderful things that had happened, 
including even the resurrection, are passed by, and only 
that is testified to which is the, to most eyes, invisible 
import and significance of the whole matter. 

The term logos or "word" ("word of life") is used 
here in a different way, but not in a discordant sense, 
from that in which it appears at the beginning of St. 
John's Gospel. In that it is used personally, in this 
impersonally; in that it is used to designate the Sub- 
ject of the Incarnation, to express Who Jesus Christ is; 
in this it designates the subject matter of the incarna- 
tion, it tells what Christ is — not only in Himself, but 
also in us. God's eternal and essential Word, the prin- 
ciple and agent of all revelation, manifestation, or 
expression of Himself — that is, of all that is — is 
defined here, not as the divine Expresser, but simply 
as the divine expression, revelation, or manifestation 
of Life. He is here to be studied, not as Who is our 
life, but as what is our life; the question is to be, not how 
God is in us for our life, but what our life is as God's. 



158 The Reason of Life 

Our immediate subject then is as to the expression of 
life, how life manifests or evidences itself — and that 
especially in humanity, whether in Jesus Christ as its 
type or original, or in us as participants in it in Him. 
Christianity as a permanent witness is witness of a 
permanent thing: it is not transmitted testimony of 
a Jesus who lived or of a resurrection that once took 
place; it is direct evidence of a Jesus who lives and of 
a resurrection that is continuously taking place. It is 
Jesus as Life that we are witnesses of; it is the resur- 
rection as the divine victory of human life that we are 
here to bear testimony to. 

The truth of Adam is altogether independent of the 
historicity of such an individual man. Adam is only the 
root and type of our common or universal humanity. 
He stands for our common nature and our common 
condition by or in nature. We express simply a com- 
mon or universal fact of nature when we say: In Adam 
we all sin, and in Adam we all die. That may be an 
inadequate account of the historical origin or cause, 
but it adequately describes the fact of sin and death. 
Now Jesus Christ stands for an equally generic and 
universal fact and principle in humanity, the principle 
of God in it, and of eternal life. If there were not in 
man an original principle and potentiality of all that 
Christ means, Christ could not become in us all that 
He does. "Whom God foreknew He predestinated 
to be conformed to the image of His Son." That 
means that God, in His eternal foreknowledge and 
fore-purpose of humanity, implanted in it the potency 



Christianity as a Witness 159 

and promise of becoming, through unity with Himself, 
all that humanity has actually become in Christ, 
through His love, grace, and fellowship in and with it. 
This is involved in the truth of our sonship to God by 
nature. We are not all products of nature; we are, 
in highest part, children of God; and His "seed" in us, 
our natural derivation from and kinship with Him, is 
in itself potency and promise of our becoming of one 
life with Him. 

In the first place then, Jesus Christ means the inner 
man potential in every man. But in the second place, 
He means that inner and merely potential man 
quickened and regenerate by the — not merely im- 
manent, but transcendent — action of Himself upon 
it, and become the "new man." By transcendent 
action is meant action not naturally transmitted, but 
personally communicated. The media of personal 
communication are invariably Word and Spirit — the 
Word, by expression to the understanding, and the 
Spirit, by appeal to and influence on the sensibilities, 
affections, and will. The function of the Word is 
the conveyance of truth or reality to us; of the Spirit, 
the quickening of apprehension, reception, and life 
in us. The evidences of life are, the passing or death 
of the "old man" or "old Adam," of subjection to 
sin and death, and the birth and life in us of the 
Christ or "new man," of the likeness and life of 
God in us. Jesus Christ is described by St. Peter 
as having ** brought us to God" — how.^^ By being 
"put to death in the flesh, but quickened or made 



160 The Reason of Life 

alive in the spirit." Flesh and Spirit had become — 
probably chiefly through the thought of St. Paul — 
synonyms for all that was respectively to be "put off" 
and "put on" by the supreme double act of the Death 
and the Resurrection of our Lord. It is not to be 
supposed that our Lord had not that which was to be 
put off in the flesh, as well as needed or was in want of 
that which was to be put on in the spirit. If it were 
not so with Him, then would He not be constituted 
and qualified to accomplish in our humanity that in 
which its salvation consists and upon which it depends : 
that is, the putting off the flesh and putting on the spirit; 
putting off nature and self in their deficiency and in- 
suflSciency, and putting on God as alone all sufficient 
for holiness, righteousness, and life. Jesus Christ did 
not put off sin and death, as having been Himself, 
personally, involved in them. He put them off by 
the act and fact of not having been involved in them: 
that is, by the act and fact of having overcome and 
abolished them. But He overcame them only in the 
human way of denying, mortifying, and crucifying 
the nature and self which, even in Him, were subject 
to sin and death, because incapable of holiness and life, 
and putting on God, who alone in us is sufficient, and 
is our sufficiency, for these. 

The symbolical language — in so far as it is so — of 
the inner and the outer man, the old and the new man, 
Adam and Christ, the flesh and the spirit, death and 
resurrection, can never be improved upon or dispensed 
with in Christianity. Not only because they are the 



Christianity as a Witness 161 

best possible symbols of facts and realities in human 
nature and experience, but because they are themselves 
more and truer than mere symbols. They are a lan- 
guage that is translatable, and must be translated, into 
all languages, because they are the exact expression 
of all higher human life. 

Witness, then, to Jesus and the resurrection is noth- 
ing if it is not witness to a present Person and a present 
and actual experience. As to the present Person: the 
tendency emphasized in these days is to divorce the 
historical Jesus from the symbolical Christ; the next 
step to which would be to dispense with the symbol, 
and thus to reduce God, and Truth, and Life from 
Persons to abstract ideas and principles. Then will 
be the end of religion; for religion is only between 
persons; the relation with ideas and principles may be 
for us science or art or philosophy; it may give us 
ethics, but it cannot be religion. When God has be- 
come the mere personification of our own conception 
of perfect truth, order, and goodness; when Jesus 
Christ has become the mere symbol of our own ideal 
of truth, beauty, and goodness, or God, incarnate in 
us, then these objects of our worship will be simply 
reduced to ourselves and the creatures of our own 
minds. And when we have really discovered that, we 
shall cease to worship them. Just because truth, 
beauty, and goodness are personal, and only in persons, 
or not at all — not to know them eternal in God, or 
incarnate in Christ, is to know them nowhere except in 
ourselves. We cannot speak of them as present or 
12 



162 The Reason of Life 

operative in the universe as a whole, or anywhere in it 
outside ourselves; for we know none, and nothing, 
outside ourselves in whom or in which they can be. 
To speak of Goodness as an ultimate principle, or a 
principle at all, in the Universe, is to assume an objec- 
tive or ultimate Personality in the universe. 

I am perfectly aware of the ignorance and inade- 
quacy of our ascription of personality to the Ultimate 
Principle of the universe; but the reality in that Princi- 
ple, as is freely admitted by the truest agnostics, must 
infinitely transcend, and in nothing fall short of, the 
personality we ascribe, and must also include it. There 
can be nothing in us that is not in It. The ablest and 
devoutest Ethical Culturist I know — agnostic as to 
anything beyond that — worships, more devoutly than 
I, precisely What I do — but not Whom I do. If, as 
he believes, What he worships is more and higher than 
Whom I worship — he would not lower nor limit It to 
my conception or designation of It — then I believe that 
we worship, not only the same Thing, but the same 
Person. And I think that I lose nothing, and he would 
lose nothing in going as far as our limitations will per- 
mit, and ascribing to the supreme Object of our worship 
at least personality and personal relation with our- 
selves — whatever more we may be failing to ascribe. 
If he were not, implicitly, worshipping a Person, he 
would not be worshipping at all, and I believe that he 
is, quite as certainly as that I am. 

Seeing, then, in Jesus Christ all that I do — the divine 
predestination and potentiality of my Self, as of all 



Christianity as a Witness 163 

human selfhood; myself, not only thus purposed and 
promised, but in Him realized and fulfilled; the outer 
man in me displaced by the inner, the old by the new, 
the flesh by the spirit, the Adam by the Christ, nature 
and self in me by God — Jesus Christ is to me, not a 
name, nor a memory or tradition, nor an idea or senti- 
ment, nor a personification, but a living and personal 
reality, presence, and power. He is God for me, to me, 
in me, and myself in God. Wherein else do we see God, 
know God, possess God than as we are in Him, and He 
in us.f^ And wherein else are we so in Him and He in us, 
as in Jesus Christ? If God is unknowable in Himself, 
whether as immanent in, beneath and behind, or tran- 
scendent above all nature and all else, where does He 
become knowable but in His Word to us and His 
Spirit in us : and that is what we mean by Jesus Christ, 
and what He is, to and in us. If God is not a Presence, 
a Reality, and a Power in Him, He is so nowhere. 
And if we are not to worship Him there, we worship 
Him not at all. "There is none other Name under 
heaven, given among men, wherein we must be saved." 
And "in His name" means "in Him," and "in Him" 
means "in His death and resurrection." 

Our relation to, our interest and actual participation 
in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is no 
mystery or magic. Assume that Christ is in fact the 
Power of God unto salvation, God in us unto and in 
our actual salvation, our holiness, our righteousness, 
our life, and so our redemption from sin and our resur- 
rection from death; assume that through faith we 



164 The Reason of Life 

experience enough to know this: we have the earnest 
and proof of it in ourselves; that in hope we appro- 
priate and possess in anticipation all that we see and 
know in Christ; — if both the objective and subjective 
facts be actually so, is it either magic or, from the 
highest point of view, even miracle, that in Jesus we 
should see God and ourselves at one, and that His 
death should be our redemption, and His resurrection 
our eternal life? 

It will of course be asked: " Yes, but is it not enough 
that the Christ shall be the ideal or spiritual Symbol 
of all that, as Adam is of all that goes before? " I admit 
that He is the symbol of it all, but not the mere sym- 
bol. By mere symbol I mean just that which is actually 
meant by those who contend for it: a sign that is not 
the thing, that represents only, and is not what it 
represents. The question is, Whose, and what kind of, 
symbol is it? If it is man's, and expresses his immanent 
conception or idea or ideal of God and himself, and the 
relation between, then it is only a sign, and by no 
means necessarily the thing signified. If, on the con- 
trary, it is God's, and the direct manifestation and 
expression from Him of Himself and man, and the 
relation between, then faith is justified in taking it for 
no mere sign, but the Thing signified, and hope, in 
appropriating to itself the whole presence and power 
and reality of it. So, Jesus Christ is to us no mere idea, 
or sentiment, or aspiration, desire, or hope of our own, 
but God's truth and reality of our at-one-ment with 
Him, our redemption from sin, our resurrection from 



Christianity as a Witness 165 

death. It is only so in faith and hope, and very imper- 
fectly so in fact, from the nature of the thing, and of us 
the subjects of it. The thing is, our personal and 
spiritual oneness with God, redemption from sin, per- 
fection in holiness, righteousness, and life. This is 
something which we have, not simply to receive, but to 
accomplish and attain of ourselves. It can be done 
only under the conditions and through the experiences 
of our life as it is: the conditions have to be met and 
overcome, and the experiences, not only to be endured 
and survived, but recognized and used as divine means 
and instruments of our making and raising to the full 
stature of ourselves. Nature is only the raw material 
of ourselves, and is incomplete without our own action 
and part in it. Ourselves are deficient and insuffi- 
cient, and can accomplish our part in fulfilling our 
nature and realizing ourselves, only in union and 
communion, both immanent and transcendent, both 
physical and personal, both natural and spiritual, with 
the All Who is God, and in the fulness of that realized 
relationship with Him which is Jesus Christ. This can 
be only gradual and progressive, but the condition of 
it, the only possibility, means, or assurance of it, is the 
certain knowledge of God's part in it, upon which faith 
and hope may depend as absolutely as our actual and 
natural dependence is upon it. It is easy enough to 
say now, that the Christ is enough as an ideal symbol 
of our own creation, but as a matter of fact the Christ 
was manifested, not in thought only, or in word only, 
but in very deed and truth, in the personal, historical, 



166 The Reason of Life 

human life, and essentially in the death and resur- 
rection, of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Jesus Christ is to us, now and always, all that He 
means; and what He means to us is Life: The Life was 
manifested, and we have seen it and bear witness to it. 
We speak that we do know, and testify that we have 
seen. The Life is the life of God; but it is the life of 
God as ours, and in us. The whole description of it, 
in Jesus or in us, is the description of a genuinely and 
essentially human life. It is no less, of course, a divine 
life, a life of divine love and grace and fellowship with 
us, of God Himself in us. But it is equally a genuinely 
human life, a life of human faith and hope and love. 
As Jesus means and is the life of God in man, so the 
resurrection means and is the victory of human life in 
God — the indestructibility and invincibility of faith, 
hope, and love, of God and the life of God in us through 
these. 

Let us take the very earliest description of this: 
"'Whom God raised up, having loosed the pangs of 
death: because it was not possible that He should be 
holden of it." Why was it impossible that Jesus 
should be holden of death .^^ Is it because He was God? 
It is absurd to speak of the possibility or impossibility 
of God's being holden of death. The ground and cause 
of the impossibility must be sought in something in 
Jesus as man. There is neither point nor pertinence 
in the saying, if it does not mean the invincibility and 
indestructibleness of the divine life in the man Jesus 
— and, through Him, in humanity. The life that 



Christianity as a Witness 167 

comes down from God as Love, Grace, and Fellowship, 
and lives in man as faith, hope, and love, is stronger 
than sin, stronger than death, is more than conqueror, 
overcomes the world, and puts all enemies under its 
feet. In Jesus the Woman's Seed bruises the serpent's 
head; the Seed of Abraham, the inheritor and perfector 
of his faith, accomplishes and gives to the world the 
blessedness of a divine righteousness; the Son of David 
sits upon the throne of a, in Him realized, and in us 
realizable, kingdom of God upon earth. 

To see that the story of the resurrection is that of 
the predestined victory of human faith over all adverse 
conditions, influences, or powers; the putting all ene- 
mies under the feet of redeemed and risen humanity; 
— we have only to go on to St. Peter's account of why 
Jesus could not be holden of death. ''For — ," says 
he, and then proceeds to put into the mouth of Jesus 
the typical and prophetic experience of David. What 
was only figuratively, hyperbolically or poetically, true 
of David, has become actual truth or fact in Jesus. 
All true faith is in part a conquest of death: David, 
in extremis, had gone down into the grave, and by the 
grace of God had come up again — just as St. Paul 
describes himself as having done — and describes the 
experience as follows: 



I beheld the Lord always before my face; 

For he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved: 

Therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; 

Moreover my flesh too shall dwell in hope; 

Because thou shalt not leave my soul in Hades, 



168 The Reason of Life 

Neither wilt thou give thy holy one to see corruption. 

Thou madest known to me the ways of life; 

Thou shalt make me full of gladness with thy countenance. 

What could more truly or exactly describe the accom- 
plished triumph of the resurrection, with which every 
deepest spiritual experience has at least the principle 
in common, and is therefore in its measure a type and 
prophecy of it? 

What was put into the mouth of David as prophecy, 
as assurance of the ultimate working out of a principle, 
the anticipative operation of which he experienced in 
himself, we hear from the mouth of Jesus in fulfilment 
of the prophecy. And we now can utter it in Him, no 
longer in mere human aspiration, or prophetic anticipa- 
tion, but in full assurance of divine manifestation and 
demonstration, that all that the Prince and Author of 
our life, and Finisher of our faith, has accomplished 
for us in Himself, He will accomplish in us through 
ourselves. 



XIV 

THE BLOOD THAT CLEANSETH 

As has been previously assumed in connection with 
the First Epistle of St. John, that Epistle treats Chris- 
tianity more in its positive aspect as a Life of God in 
Christ, and our participation in that life, than in its 
negative aspect as a sacrifice for and a redemption from 
sin. But this latter aspect is by no means ignored — 
indeed, is very distinctly presupposed and assumed. 
The position the Epistle would seem to suggest, if not 
positively occupy, is tnat of warning against claiming 
an interest in the objective redemption of our Lord, 
through His death, without or apart from a subjective 
participation with Him in His life. There is in the 
position an unconscious kinship with that held by St. 
Paul (Romans V. 10): "If, while we were enemies, we 
were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, 
much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved in His 
life." St. John would say, "If we are not walking in 
the light, then are we not in the life of God in Christ; 
and if we are not in the life, then we cannot claim any 
part in the redemption or reconciliation through the 
death of Jesus Christ." The argument is a posteriori^ 
from effect to cause, from evidence to fact: If we are 
actually and manifestly walking in the light, then know 



170 The Reason of Life 

we that we have that Life which is the only true light 
of men; and if we have the life, then know we that, 
through our right attitude and relation to it, the blood 
of Jesus Christ has expunged our sin and at-one-d us 
with God. Each stage or step of our actual redemption 
proves the preceding one, and so we reason back from 
the last to the first. 

If we say either that we have not sinned or that we 
have not sin, we show an elemental ignorance or un- 
consciousness of the first obstacle and discovery of 
the spiritual life within us. Holiness manifests itself 
to us only in the opposition to sin, and realizes itself 
in us only in the overcoming of sin: he who does 
not know sin has not begun to know holiness; and 
by holiness we mean, the spirit, nature, and life of 
God in us. 

If, to ourselves and to God, "we confess our sins" 

— if we stand in the only possible true relation and 
attitude to sin, that of a genuine and real repentance 

— then is God "faithful and righteous to forgive us 
our sins." Forgiveness, either under or upon any 
other condition, is a moral impossibility, alike for God 
and for us. Forgiveness here means remission or put- 
ting away; certain kinds of consequences or penalties 
of sin might be remitted without regard to the attitude 
of the sinner to his sin. These are mostly human and 
artificial consequences; for the most part, natural, 
and certainly spiritual, consequences or penalties are 
irremediable except upon necessary conditions. You 
might, after a human fashion, remit the punishment 



The Blood that Cleanseth 171 

for sin, or alter the outward status of the sinner, treat 
him as not being one, regardless of his own disposition 
toward his sin; but there can be no real or divine 
pardon or forgiveness or remission of sin, or making 
a sinner not a sinner, without the full cooperation of 
the sinner himself in the act, and in the attitude 
of God in the act. To God, and to the real penitent, 
the true sequel, condemnation, judgment, and penalty 
of sin is in the sin itself, and in no mere external acci- 
dent or circumstance of it. The only real pardon or 
forgiveness or remission for it, is the putting away of 
itself: and the putting away of the sin itself is possible 
only through the sinner himself. I say "through," not 
*'by"; it can be put away only by God, through the 
sinner; but equally it can be put away by God only 
through the sinner. That is why the action of divine 
grace is never severed from the condition of human 
repentance and faith. 

But now, while there can be no divine putting away 
of sin that is not conditioned by and upon the sinner's 
putting it away, it is not only possible but rational 
and natural that God's putting away should both ante- 
date and condition the sinner's. In all human action, 
conduct, character, or life, that is personal, moral, or 
spiritual, attitude or disposition must precede action, 
and action must precede performance or accomplish- 
ment. Now if a man, through the prevenient grace of 
God, assumes the right initial attitude toward his own 
sin, of repentance, and toward God's holiness, of faith, 
hope, and love — God is faithful and right to see and 



172 The Reason of Life 

recognize In that initial disposition the beginning of 
action, and in action, with His help, the pledge and 
promise of accomplishment or fulfilment. On the 
other hand, it is only the evidence, assurance, and 
experience on the man's part that God will so accept 
and treat his most elementary disposition, and takes 
what he means, and would be, for what he so infinitely 
as yet is not — it is only that, I say, that can possibly 
encourage and enable the man to put his disposition 
into action, and to complete his action into accomplish- 
ment and attainment. 

That is what we might call the divine philosophy 
of the attitude which St. John ascribes to God: If, 
obeying the motions of His Spirit, we will take up the 
true attitude toward our sin, and toward His love 
and grace and holiness, then He will be faithful and 
righteous on His part to more than meet our least 
movement toward Him. Indeed any movement on 
our part is already His motion in us: 

"Every inmost aspiration is God's Angel undefiled. 
And in every "O, my Father," slumbers deep a "Here, my Child." 

On our part, *' confession of sins" supposes and in- 
cludes a real sense and consciousness of sin, the conse- 
quent need and desire of both pardon and cleansing, 
and faith in the love and grace and fellowship of God 
for these ends. On God's part, He recognizes in this 
disposition — which is itself His gift — the condition 
upon which His pardoning and cleansing grace is possi- 



The Blood that Cleanseth 173 

ble, or is operative and effectual in us; He accepts the 
attitude or disposition a quo for the end ad querriy and 
treats our faith and hope as though they were attain- 
ment and possession. 

What, however, seems to be the desire and intention 
of the Apostle and the Epistle is to connect inseparably, 
if not identify, the grace of pardon and the grace of 
cleansing — what we have divided into the two parts 
of justification and sanctification. The first of these 
is meaningless apart from the second; the second is 
impossible apart from the first: it is only in God's both 
pardoning and cleansing love, grace, and fellowship, 
that we can both receive and accomplish the holiness, 
righteousness, and life, which is the end and the sub- 
stance of all our salvation. So the Apostle would say : 
"If we are walking in the light, then are we living in 
the Life; and then — the blood of Jesus, the Son of 
God, not only justifies or acquits us of all condemnation 
or guilt, but is actually sanctifying or cleansing us from 
all sin." This appears in the further progress of the 
argument — if so subtle and delicate a sequence of 
thought or life can be called an argument. "My little 
children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not." 
The end of the Gospel of Christ is, that we sin not at 
all: that there be no longer any sin in us: Christ has 
abolished sin, not only in Himself, but in us. So He 
has — but, so far as we are concerned, potentially, 
not yet actually: in God's gracious act and provision, 
and in our appropriating and anticipative faith, but 
not yet in the accomplished fact of assimilation and 



174 The Reason of Life 

attainment on our part. That is a necessary separation 
and sequence: what we have ourselves to be and do, 
must be ours to be accompUshed and to become, before 
it can be ours accompUshed and actually become. 
Therefore, while the Apostle insists that " the blood of 
Christ," or "being in God," must mean and must be 
— sin abolished, and holiness possessed; he knows that 
this, in us, must be a process of time and change, and 
so recognizes that while the determining and ultimate 
principle of our life will be holiness, and therefore 
sinlessness, sin will not be instantaneously dead, and 
will recur. 

Therefore he adds: "And if one sins, we have an 
Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous: 
and He is the propitiation for our sins." This opens 
to us the whole ground of our spiritual and moral status 
or standing with God, as held by St. John, in harmony 
with all Apostolic teaching. Jesus Christ is Himself 
"The Righteous," or the righteous One: He is the 
"righteousness of God revealed": at once, God our 
Righteousness, and humanity righteous through God 
in it. Jesus Christ is both parts or sides in the unity 
of God and man, both gratia gratians and gratia gratiata^ 
the divine grace that graces or confers, and the human 
grace received and shared. The human righteousness 
of Jesus Christ, which alone is or can become ours, was 
humanly both received and wrought by Himself: it 
was a righteousness alike of perfect faith and of perfect 
obedience. It was a righteousness, of which His 
"blood" was the sole condition, and is the only 



The Blood that Cleanseth 175 

symbol. The Holy of Holies could be entered only 
with the blood of the Offerer up of Himself without 
spot to God. Nothing short of that perfect attitude 
toward sin which is death at once to it and from it, 
and that perfect attitude toward holiness which is the 
life of God Himself in us, constitutes the righteousness 
that Jesus Christ was, and the righteousness that He 
gives. His blood was, not only His own actual death 
to sin, but must be no less ours also. 

It remains to examine, from St. John's point of view, 
the exact meaning of the declaration that Jesus Christ, 
the righteous, was the "propitiation for our sins." 
We may first correlate it with similar expressions from 
other apostolic sources. St. Paul tells us (2 Cor. V. 19) 
how that "God was in Christ reconciling the world 
unto Himself, not reckoning unto them their tres- 
passes." This reconciliation the Authorized Version 
(Rom. V. 11) calls "the atonement" — manifestly in 
the sense of at-one-ment. **God in Christ" in itself 
means the reconciliation of God and the world, or their 
at-one-ment: it is no mere true expression of the thing, 
but the Thing Itself realized and accomplished. God 
comes to His own in the world, and the world comes to 
itself in God — both alike in Jesus Christ. That 
which is fact accomplished in Christ, is fact accom- 
plishing, and to be accomplished in us in Christ. And 
the process of accomplishment is this : Upon repentance 
from sin and faith in God, God sees and receives the 
sinner in Christ. He no longer reckons or imputes to 
him the sin which he himself repudiates and disowns. 



176 The Reason of Life 

but invests him with, as his own, the hoUness or right- 
eousness which he sees and appropriates to himself by 
faith in Christ. That so-called imputation is the divine 
method of giving or imparting to the sinner the holiness 
and righteousness which he has not and cannot have in 
himself, except by the divine impartation. 

The merging and identifying of our repentance, and 
whole subsequent relation to sin, into and with that 
act of Jesus Christ which was in fact the death of sin 
and His own human death to sin, is explicable and 
comprehensible only as we see in Jesus Christ the revela- 
tion and manifestation of God's grace in all humanity 
— all, that is, that through Jesus Christ believes and 
accepts : the grace which will in us all complete repen- 
tance into death to sin, as it completes faith into life 
in God. The function of faith is to know in ourselves 
" the exceeding greatness of God's power to usward who 
believe, according to that strength of His might which 
He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the 
dead." Jesus Christ was manifested *'for our sake, 
who through Him are believers in God, which raised 
Him from the dead, and gave Him glory; so that our 
faith and hope might be in God." It is not that Jesus 
Christ was an individual sample or example of human 
salvation. Christ is in fact as universal and generic 
as, symbolically, Adam is. He is God in humanity 
and in every man who repents and believes. His 
death and resurrection are not only representatively 
but potentially those of every man, and actually those 
of every man who thoroughly believes. "We judge. 



The Blood that Cleanseth 177 

that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died 
for all" — not that all need not die, or may be merely- 
pardoned: but that they may so truly die — "that 
they should no longer live unto themselves, but unto 
him who, for their sakes died and rose again." Death 
in all these connections must be taken in the sense in 
which it is manifestly intended: not the physical fact, 
but a spiritual and moral act, the death of the Adam 
in us through the resurrection and life of the Christ. 
"If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation: the 
old things are passed away; behold, new things have 
come to pass:" he is dead in the flesh, and risen and 
alive in the spirit. St. Paul shows everywhere the 
same solicitude that St. John does, that Jesus should 
not be instead of us, exclusively, but for us, inclusively: 
that His death should not be instead of our death, but 
should be our death. 

At Rom. III. 25 God is said to have "set forth Jesus 
Christ to be a propitiation, through faith, by His 
blood." First as to Jesus Himself, His way into the 
Holy of Holies, of utter conquest of sin and oneness 
with God, was with blood — through the torn veil of His 
flesh. As St. Peter expresses it: "Christ also suffered 
for sins once, that He might bring us unto God; being 
put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit." 
His act of utter holiness — that is, of perfect love, 
service and sacrifice — destroyed the sin that separated 
us from God, and so " brought us" to God. "We were 
redeemed" — to holiness, from the vanity or emptiness 
of our life apart from God — "with precious blood, as 
13 



178 The Reason of Life 

of a lamb without blemish or spot, the blood of Christ." 
Such is Jesus Christ, and such was that act of human 
redemption, that in Him and in it we all stand, not 
merely, I repeat, representatively, but potentially re- 
deemed. And nothing stands between us and our actual 
and eternal redemption but the one condition, without 
which it cannot act either upon or in us, the condition of 
our faith in and appropriation of it. Jesus Christ is our 
propitiation in the absolute sense of our ultimate per- 
fect becoming one with God in Him. He is in the mean 
time our propitiation in the relative sense, that even 
in our incomplete faith and unrealized hope in Christ, 
God reckons not against us all that is lacking in us, 
but imputes to us, or accounts as ours, all that is ful- 
filled in Christ. If we in good faith repudiate and 
disown the self in us for the Christ in us, God sees only 
the Christ and not the self that is still in us. 

In this, as in every other respect, if only we go deep 
enough, we see the substantial agreement of every 
single New Testament interpreter of Jesus Christ and 
His Gospel. St. John, St. Peter, St. Paul, the Writer 
to the Hebrews are at one in seeing in Jesus, not merely 
in a general way the presence of God in man, and the 
life of man in God; but no less that divine-human One- 
ness mediated and accomplished in the only possible 
way: by the removal of the one cause of separation 
between them: and that removal accomplished in the 
one possible way of bringing every man to the issue 
and to the power of death to sin and life in God. 

In this connection, I may suggest one possible inter- 



The Blood that Cleanseth 179 

pretation of a diflScult passage in the Epistle we are 
considering. "Who is he that overcometh the world, 
but he that belie veth that Jesus is the Son of God? 
This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus 
Christ; not in the water only, but in the water and in 
the blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, 
because the Spirit is the truth." The "Son of God" 
here expresses not the Divine Sonship that was eternal 
with God, but the human sonship to God that came 
with our Lord's life on earth, and was accomplished or 
completed only in His resurrection. "He was deter- 
mined Son of God with power, according to the spirit of 
holiness, by the resurrection of the dead." (Rom. I. 4.) 
Faith in Jesus as the Son of God and faith in Him as 
the Christ are synonymous expressions in the Epistle 
before us. The Chrism wherewith humanity in the per- 
son of our Lord is anointed is the spirit, nature, and life 
of God: the anointing is regeneration or birth from 
above, the divine impartation of sonship. It in no 
wise conflicts with the eternal essential Sonship of our 
Incarnate Lord, to say that as man He was subject to 
the universal human law and process of becoming son 
of God. Sonship with us is a free, personal self -con- 
forming to the spirit, nature, and life of sons. It is not 
the natural potentiality, but the spiritual actuality or 
actualizing of all that is involved in the filial relation. 
In humanity it involves the exclusion of all that is 
unfilial, or contrary to the divine nature, as well as the 
inclusion of all that is filial, that is, full participation 
in all the divine nature. Participation in the divine 



180 The Reason of Life 

nature is holiness, and the vital principle of all holiness 
is perfect love. 

Now when St. John speaks of our Lord's "coming by 
water and blood," the reference is to the manner in 
which, or the process by which, divine sonship in Him 
was humanly consummated. It comes, first, in the 
water of baptism: that is, it comes by birth from above, 
by descent of the Holy Ghost into Him. But the sym- 
bolical water of baptism only confers the principle and 
power of Sonship, or of the divine life. It but equips 
for, and calls to, the real work and life of divine sonship. 
It signifies, involves, and promises the death to sin 
and life to God, but it looks forward to the actualizing 
or realizing these on the part of the subject himself. 
Therefore divine sonship in its accomplished complete- 
ness comes, not in the water alone, in the fact of the 
full endowment for it by the Holy Ghost, but in the 
water and in the blood, in the endowment for it followed 
and finished by the performance or accomplishment of 
it. The water of Jordan means, and finds its fulfilment 
only in, the blood of Calvary, the actual and complete 
death to sin and life to God. "And it is the spirit that 
beareth witness, because the spirit is the truth." The 
mere letter of all this amounts to nothing, just as the 
flesh by itself profiteth nothing. It is the spirit that 
quickens and imparts life and reality. The reality of 
the water and of the blood, of regeneration, of the death 
and resurrection, is witnessed and proved only in the 
spirit and power of the new life, in the genuineness and 
reality of the sonship attained. 



The Blood that Cleanseth 181 

It IS only sonship to God, so realized and accom- 
plished, that conquers the world. It was so with our 
Lord Himself: **In the world," He says, "ye have 
tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome 
the world." It was not as God that He overcame the 
world, but as man; in the human way of a perfect faith, 
love, and obedience; by full proof and use of the divine 
Fatherhood and His own human sonship. When at 
His baptism our Lord heard from heaven the divine 
commendation, "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom 
I am well pleased," it was the human sonship in Him 
and not the Divine that received approval. When in 
the wilderness the temptation came to Him, "7/ thou 
art the son of God" — it was His human, and not His 
eternal Divine Sonship that was under trial. It was our 
Lord's perfect hold upon the fatherhood of God, His per- 
fect maintenance and realization of His own sonship to 
God, that gave Him His perfect victory over the world, 
that made Him the conqueror and destroyer of sin, and 
was the cause that He could not be holden of death. 

His victory was our victory: He wrought it in our 
nature, and works it in ourselves. "This is the victory 
that overcometh the world, even our faith." And 
what is the exact and specific ground and substance of 
our faith? "Who is he that overcometh the world, 
but he who believeth that Jesus is the Son of God.f^" 
"He that confesseth the Son hath the Father." Jesus 
has given us the Father, through the revelation and 
impartation to us of His own sonship. His own victory 
and peace. His own risen and ascended life. 



182 The Reason of Life 

Jesus Christ is God's perfect witness to us, both of 
Himself and of us, and of the relation He has instituted 
and established between us. "He that believeth on 
the Son of God hath the witness in him: he that believ- 
eth not God hath made Him a liar; because he hath not 
believed in the witness that God hath borne concerning 
His Son. And the witness is this, that God gave unto 
us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that 
hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son 
of God hath not the life." 

I use interchangeably "Spirit" and "spirit," "Son" 
and "son." The "Eternal Spirit, or spirit," through 
Whom, or through which, Jesus Christ "oflEered HimseK 
without spot to God" (Heb. IX 14), was equally the 
Personal Spirit of God and the human spirit actuating 
Jesus. If it were not both, in a perfect unity, it could 
be neither in that consummate divine-human act and 
character. So, if the accomplished human sonship of 
Jesus to God were not the Incarnation of the Eternal 
Son of God in our humanity and in us, it would alike 
have been impossible in Him, and be impossible in us. 
On the other hand, the incarnation of Divine Sonship 
would be impossible and meaningless, otherwise than 
in our own human sonship by ourselves accomplished 
in and through it. 



XV 

THE COMFORT OF CHRISTIANITY 

In both Gospel and Epistle St. John applies, first to 
our Lord Himself, and secondarily to the Holy Ghost, 
the title Paraclete, or Advocate, or Helper, or Com- 
forter. The word, in both Greek and Latin, means 
etymologically "one called to, to the side of, to the aid 
of another." One who is unable himself "to manage 
his own business," "conduct his own case," or "carry 
through his own cause," needs the services of another 
who can do it with and for him. The Latin term advo- 
cate has been limited to one who discharges that 
function in law; but it need not be so restricted in the 
part assigned to the office in the Gospel. There is no 
question that man in his natural state is in a case in 
which he needs intervention from without and from 
above himself. He cannot, of himself, Uve his life, or 
be himself: insuperable obstacles and complications 
lie between him and either the fulfilment of his nature 
or the realization of himself. The increasing recog- 
nition of the claim that religion is a necessary fact and 
factor in human life, is confession of the truth that 
humanity is dependent upon some sort of divine 
cooperation and help. I wish in this chapter to discuss 
the nature of that human demand, and of the divine 
supply to it. 

183 



184 The Reason of Life 

It is a necessity of the time, as well for the correction 
as for the defence of Christianity, to point out how 
consistently, in its origin in the New Testament, it is 
its function to be a help, and not an interference, in 
and with human life. It is never anything to be done 
merely for, or instead of, but always something done 
with and in: never a substitute for, but always the 
realization, and self-realization, of that for which it is. 
There is a natural disposition to complain that God 
does not Himself do things, or prevent things, in the 
world. I am prepared to admit that there are no such 
interventions or interferences on His part in the natural 
course of the world. In purely natural matters His 
part is so conformed and confined to His own method 
and law of " Nature," that we have come to apply to it 
the notion and principle of " necessity." It is not in 
things but in persons — not in the domain of invariable 
law, but in that of freedom and grace — that we are 
to look for interventions and assistances. The natural 
world is here for us, and our uses in it. What God 
does beyond that in it. He does in and with, and through 
and by us. What more in it ought to be done, or 
ought to be remedied or prevented, we are here to do 
or to remedy or prevent. It is for us to have or acquire 
the knowledge, the skill, the disposition, and the will 
to make the world all that it ought to be. It ought to 
be only, and all, that which we can make it; and we 
can make it all that it ought to be. Wherein we are 
insufficient, of ourselves, for the task, it is the function 
of religion to reenforce and enable us; but that is all 



The Comfort of Christianity 185 

that religion undertakes to do — or, for our sakes, 
ought to do. To be spared any part of the responsi- 
biUty, or the labor, or the pain of what we are here for, 
or of what the world is here to furnish the necessary 
conditions for, would be outside interference, not in 
the interest of, but against all the means and ends of 
our being. If there are things that ought to be, and 
are not, or if there are things that ought not to be in 
the world, and are — it is infinitely better for us that 
they should wait indefinitely upon us to supply or 
remove, than that God should be expected to do it 
for us. 

I am quite at the other extreme from denying that 
God is as much alive and present and operative in His 
world at this moment as at any other in its past; but 
the ever-new creative energy that is always in process 
operates, as a matter of fact, in this world of ours, in 
and with and through human freedom and initiative; 
and the changes to be made in the world all wait, and 
will always wait, to be made by ourselves, and not by 
Another without or instead of us. If accidents happen, 
or plagues spread, or evils exist, or vice reigns among 
us, we need indeed to call upon God to remedy or pre- 
vent them — but only as we "know His ways," and 
understand that He will not do anything for us that 
we will not do for ourselves. We need Him every 
hour, but we need Him in ourselves, in what we are 
and do, rather than in anything done or to be done 
for or instead of us. 

This "way of God" appears first and most mani- 



186 The Reason of Life 

festly in the method and manner of the Incarnation 
itself. The Life that was manifested — however un- 
quahfiedly it was the Life that was with God, and that 
was God — was, nevertheless, manifested wholly as our 
life: the Godhead was wholly within the humanity. 
There was nothing of knowledge, of power, or of 
divinity, visible or present in our Lord's humanity, as 
such, that was not humanly communicated to it, that 
was not ascribed to the action of the Holy Ghost in 
Him as it is the function of the Holy Ghost to act in 
humanity. If the Spirit of God operated more pow- 
erfully, even perfectly, in Him, it was precisely in the 
ratio in which, humanly. He cooperated most perfectly 
with the Holy Ghost. This is not only plain matter of 
record, but is vital to the sense in which the Divine 
Life, in Him, became our life. There is a sense in which, 
and a process by which humanity, potentially divine in 
itself, can become actually divine by itself. The process 
is by faith, through which reciprocally Deity unites 
itself with humanity, and humanity unites itself with 
Deity. Jesus Christ is the revelation, the realization, 
on both sides, of that divine-human process. 

Jesus Christ, then, is "God for us," distinctly in the 
sense of " God with us and in us." The attitude of 
God toward us, in Him, is that of sympathy and co- 
operation with us in our condition: grace to enable us 
to overcome and surmount our condition; never of 
deliverance from the condition otherwise than through 
our own victory over it. The condition is part of the 
process, to annul which would be to annul our own 



The Comfort of Christianity 187 

part in it. This may seem as though God created evil 
for us to overcome. But there is no evil in all our 
condition apart from our personal will and disposition 
and action toward it, or apart from human responsi- 
bility in relation to it. It is idle, however, to specu- 
late about the responsibility for existing conditions. 
They are here, and the question is what is to be done 
about them.f^ To what extent are they to be changed 
or helped by prayer and miracle .^^ No little indeed by 
prayer, and no less by miracle — if we mean the true 
miracles wrought, and that ought infinitely more to 
be wrought, by prayer. But all miracle wrought in 
this human world of ours otherwise than through and 
by ourselves is at the cost and expense of ourselves. 
The habit of expecting God to do things or to prevent 
things is nothing else or less than the shifting from 
ourselves the responsibility, and the deadening in 
ourselves and in human society the sense of responsi- 
bility, for doing and preventing or curing things. We 
are not set in the garden of this world to sit down and 
see God till and tend it for us; nor, if we prefer the 
figure, in the wilderness or desert of the world, to wait 
upon prayer and miracle to make it blossom as the 
rose — either materially, morally, or spiritually. 

But what miracles will not be wrought by prayer, 
what wonders will not God perform by His grace 
through our faith, if our will to be divine shall ever 
meet and equal His desire to be human in us! We 
cannot too often recall and ponder upon His lament: 
"How would I! — and ye will not." 



188 The Reason of Life 

Let us illustrate a little from the teaching or example 
of the New Testament the principle I have been insist- 
ing upon. There has been some question whether our 
English equivalent " Comforter " truly expresses the 
function . belonging to the Paraclete, Advocate, or 
Helper. It does so, I think, if we understand the 
term in all the fulness of its etymological meaning, but 
not otherwise. "Comfort — (con-fortis) To impart 
strength and hope to; " — says the dictionary. There 
are two ways of helping or saving from any evil — ex- 
ternally to remove the evil, or internally to fortify and 
strengthen against the evil. A patient calls in to his 
bedside, or to his aid, the physician, who is thus a true 
advocatus or paraclete. The physician may use an 
antidote or specific which neutralizes or removes the 
cause of trouble. Or, letting that alone, he may so 
treat the condition or system of the patient as to enable 
him of himself to throw oflE or overcome the trouble. 
Germs of disease are dangerous only to impaired or 
diseased tissues and systems. Impart vitality and 
vigor to these, and they may be rendered immune 
against the seeds of sickness. 

The sense in which our Lord applies to Himself first 
the title Paraclete may be developed somewhat as 
follows: Jesus Christ may be defined as the divine 
response to the cry of humanity for help from above. 
There is a case or cause, not only between us and God, 
but no less between us and ourselves, us and our 
higher ends and destinies, which we are essentially 
insufficient to manage or conduct for ourselves. As 



The Comfort of Christianity 189 

before an earthly tribunal the chosen advocate stands 
for and represents his client, pleads his cause, conducts 
his case, mediates between him and the law or the 
judge, so in our larger cause Jesus Christ stands with 
us, by us, and mediates for us, not only, as I have said, 
between us and God, but, in that, between us and 
eternal right or righteousness, between us and our 
proper ends and selves. The claim or demand of God 
or of righteousness upon us is not to be distinguished 
from that of ourselves upon us: we cannot think of 
God otherwise than as the infinite or perfect of our- 
selves, or truly of ourselves otherwise than as the 
incomplete and imperfect of what God is. The 
tribunal before which Christ stands for us is within 
us: He stands for the eternal and infinite " ought " of 
ourselves, the mediator not only of its revelation but 
of its realization. 

But the point to observe is how consistently God 
in Christ appears as the helper of, and not the substi- 
tute for, ourselves. The Paraclete combines the func- 
tions of His office, interpreted actively as well as 
passively : He is not alone the " Called upon " but the 
" Caller upon." He is the sympathizer, the encour- 
ager, the strengthener, the enabler, and in all those 
senses the Comforter. He has begotten us unto a 
living hope by His own resurrection from the dead. 
He says to us, " Be of good cheer, I have overcome 
the world." He calls upon us to be and do what 
He Himself has done and is. He is the Author of 
our salvation and life, as having been the leader, 



190 The Reason of Life 

the fore-runner, the first-begotten in it. He has done 
and is nothing for us that He does not call on us to 
do and be in Him. God in Him has aboUshed 
nothing either of the conditions under which, or of 
the process by which, it is appointed for, and is the 
higher nature of, all men to become divine. The 
Deity of our Lord, in contradistinction from the 
divinity which He shares with and imparts to us all, 
is to be found, not in any distinction in kind in His 
humanity or in His human life from ours, but in the 
fact that He is the Incarnation from God as well 
as the impartation in us of all that He is in our 
nature. He gives Himself to us, not only as sample 
or example, as evidence and proof of what God 
would do with us and in us — if we will — but as the 
effectual power and substance of it. Through our 
faith, hope, and love He enters into us as the very 
matter of our salvation and substance of ourselves — 
God our holiness, our righteousness, our life. 

So, to turn again for a moment from Jesus as advo- 
cate of our cause, to Jesus as physician of our souls. 
His miracles of healing are ordinarily to be looked for 
in us and through us, and only mediately and second- 
arily upon us. Even where they were, or are, mani- 
fested physically or phenomenally, the real miracle, 
the new matter, force or power, was in the subjective 
condition or cause rather than in the objective 
effect. 

We have still to illustrate from the New Testament 
the principle that the true Christian aphesis is not 



The Comfort of Christianity 191 

the putting away of the evil from the person, but the 
release of the person from, enabling him against, the 
evil. It is always not only being saved but a saving 
himself from the power of the thing. One's self can 
be saved only by being directed and enabled in the 
saving oneself. In the case of our Lord Himself, 
nothing so brings His humanity home to our hearts as 
what may be called the natural weakness in Him, the 
elemental instinctive wish, on the first impulse, to have 
the extreme evil, the overwhelming temptation taken 
away from Him, to be spared what seems impossible to 
be endured. When " the hour " so long foreseen, even 
in anticipation accepted, is actually upon Him, what 
is the first instinctive impulse and utterance.? "What 
shall I say! — Father save me from this hour." And 
immediately recollection and reflection correct the 
momentary instinct: "But for this cause came I to this 
hour." If we could all recollect and reflect, when 
temptation in its thousand forms assails us and seems 
more than we can bear, that " for this cause are we 
here!" Without going further back into reasons and 
causes that precede facts, our conditions in this world, 
as Bishop Butler says, "are what they are." And we 
are here to meet them as they are. It is no part of the 
manifest divine intention, in the whole or in any of 
the particulars, to alter the conditions for us, but only 
to do so through and with and by us — so fast and 
so far as we will act in and with Him. God did not 
spare His only-begotten Son the suffering of that 
dreadful hour; but He did what was infinitely wiser 



192 The Reason of Life 

and kinder: He saved Him, not from it, but in it, 
and through it, and by it. Again, as the hour draws 
yet nearer, nature will make itself heard: "Father, if 
it be possible, let this cup pass from me!" And 
again the true and the right that are above nature 
assert themselves: "Nevertheless, not my will, but 
Thine, be done!" Again, if we could but learn the 
lesson, that — not alone if we love God, but if we 
truly love ourselves — not our wishes, who know not, 
but His Will, who knows, and Who loves us better 
than we love ourselves, is that which is to be done! 
In all the earthly life of Jesus, which is the revelation 
of human life as God would be in it, and as it should 
be in God, I see no exception to the principle that 
our life is here to meet earthly and human conditions 
and to overcome and survive them — not that the 
inevitable is ever to be removed from before us, or 
that we are to be spared the pain of its endurance 
and the necessity of its conquest. 

We learn the same lesson from the experience of 
those who follow most immediately and completely 
in our Lord's footsteps. St. Paul was crippled by 
"a thorn in the flesh" which impeded and threatened 
to defeat his ministry. Thrice he besought the Lord 
that it might depart from him; and the answer came, 
"My grace is sufficient for thee: My power is made 
perfect through weakness." Thenceforth St. Paul's 
support in the face of all difficulties or obstacles is, 
"I can endure all things, and do all things, through 
Him that strengtheneth me." No more in the case 



The Comfort of Christianity 193 

of the Apostles than in that of their Lord do I see that 
miracles were wrought for them in answer to prayer; 
we see marvellous miracles wrought in and through 
them by grace working through faith and prayer. 

The above discussion has nothing whatever to do 
with the question of the possibility, or the probability, 
or the actual occurrence of any kind of miracle or 
miracles. No one who seriously and understandingly 
holds the doctrine of the Incarnation and the truth 
of our Lord's Person and Work will hesitate about 
any inferior fact essential to that supreme one. But 
I am not talking now of what might, could, or would 
happen under any circumstances, but only of what is 
God's actual principle and mode of dealing, through 
Christianity, with human life and destiny. When we 
say or feel, as so often we do, that certain things that 
come by natm-al consequences, because of their sad 
or appalling effects upon human life or happiness, 
" ought not to be permitted," or " are mysterious 
and inexplicable " (though as natural occurrences 
they may be not only explicable but necessary), or 
" shake our faith in a divine providence," and even 
" in God," — what is meant by such thoughts and 
utterances is nothing less than this: either that nature 
itself is all wrong, or that God ought to be constantly 
interfering with it and shaping it in the supposed 
interest of every being whom it concerns. In reply 
to which I would say, That if nature were not just as 
constant, as invariable, even as necessary and as 
seemingly indifferent and inexorable as it is, human 
14 



194 The Reason of Life 

life in all its highest characteristics and ends would be 
impossible in it. 

On the other hand, I am a literal and firm believer 
in the divine assurance that to those who love God, 
and who enter into and understand His divine pur- 
poses, all things — absolutely all things, in nature as 
well as in grace — work together unto their eternal 
good. By "loving God" I mean no more nor less than 
loving eternal truth, and order, and goodness; not one 
of which is a mere abstract idea or sentiment, and all 
of which can meet and be real only in an eternal Person. 
Life is possible only in reaction or interaction with 
environment, but it is by no means lived only in or by 
concurrence and correspondence with environment. 
Life has in large measure to shape, mould, and even 
remake its environment. We are here, not to conform 
or correspond with the world as it is, but to be perpet- 
ually reforming and making a new world out of it. 
So far from our life being a correspondence with our 
world, it is equally true that it is here to be made 
through enmity with and conquest over the world. 
The enmity of the world is at least as necessary to the 
making and shaping of human life as its friend- 
ship. 

For what do we mean by the friendship or the enmity, 
the concurrence or the contradiction, between us and 
our environment. The distinction between right and 
wrong, and the liability of things to the alternative 
possibility of right or wrong, is the root and ground, the 
condition, in nature of the existence of such a thing as 



The Comfort of Christianity 195 

human freedom, of moral reason, choice, and will, of 
finite character and personality. We have said, with 
Kant, that there is nothing right or good but the right 
or good will: moral distinctions exist only for and in 
the free will. But in a lower sense of ''right" it is evi- 
dent that, from the beginning of the evolution of life 
as we know it, it has been liable to the possibility of 
going right or wrong. In the most mechanical of 
natural products, the most material multiplications 
of offspring, the fact of ''variations," the recognition 
of degrees of fitness and unfitness, in consequence of 
which some survive and some perish, some are benef- 
icent and some injurious, some beautiful and right, 
others ugly and wrong — these facts or phenomena of 
bare nature, prior to the appearance in it of spirit or 
personality, are premonitions and preparations that 
look forward to and are explained by the real right and 
wrong, good and bad, of the formal freedom with and 
in which personality and humanity are born. By 
formal freedom is meant reason to understand and 
freedom to make right or wrong choice and to perform 
good or bad actions. The evolution or transition 
from necessary to free, from physical to spiritual, from 
product of nature to child of God, will never be scien- 
tifically traceable or explicable. Life has depths of 
mystery in it far beneath the plummet of any earthly 
student of mere phenomena. All that we know is 
that, out of a seemingly eternal process of gradual 
becoming, there has come and does exist a world of 
finite spirit, of reason to understand and freedom to 



196 The Reason of Life 

choose moral opposites, to pursue and to reach alter- 
native ends and destinies. This is the only complete 
meaning or possible reality of right and wrong, good 
and bad; and for this possibiUty, and the spiritual 
and moral personality conditioned by it, all things else 
have existed and do exist. It is perfectly true that 
Personality is the only true final cause or real end-in- 
itself. There is nothing else jor which in any true 
sense things can be. 

The world for us then cannot be otherwise than a 
world of possible good and evil, right and wrong: and 
if possible, then actual. There is no choice of good 
that is not an actual rejection of evil, nor choice of 
wrong that is not a real refusal of right. I admit 
that the practical distinguishing of the gradations 
between mere mechanical action on the one hand and 
free, spiritual and moral, action on the other, is impos- 
sible for us — and therefore the denial to us of final 
judgment or retributive justice — but the distinction 
exists, and the whole higher evolution of humanity 
is into the truer recognition and sense of it. 

I repeat, therefore, that life for us is correspondence 
and cooperation with a world of right, or with the right 
of the world; and enmity with a world of wrong, or with 
all the wrong of the world. In which the true part and 
good for us is, not in the having things changed for 
us, but the changing them ourselves; not in looking 
to God to abolish the evil, but for grace and power, in 
our Lord, which means in ourselves, to endure, over- 
come, and so abolish it. What is true of the individual 



The Comfort of Christianity 197 

man is true of the world of humanity; and the individ- 
ual has always to wait and suffer for the slow move- 
ments of humanity. Society is cruel to men and 
women in its resistance and reluctance to right its 
wrongs and to recognize and advance their rights. 
But it is better for society to have to bear and dis- 
charge its own responsibility, no matter at what cost, 
or in what time, than that there be outside divine 
intervention to hasten it. It is better that the physi- 
cal health of the earth should, after so long, be bet- 
tered by sanitary and salutary humanity, intelligence, 
energy, and actual cleansing, than that long ago God 
should have worked miracles in opposition to plagues 
in response to faith and prayer. The better place for 
His miracles is in the awakened, enlightened, and ener- 
gized intelligence, afifections, and wills of men, society, 
humanity, to do these things for themselves and for 
others. It is absurd to desire or to expect that God 
should have made us men, in His image, by giving us 
to have life in ourselves, by putting it upon us to make 
our own lives; should have placed us in an environ- 
ment with all the materials and conditions for making 
our own world, after a pattern and fashion which He 
should show us in the Mount; and that then He shall 
intervene and interfere to make our lives and our world 
not our own, the expression, not of our growing and 
developing reasons, affections, wills, and powers, but 
of His own omnipotent power. 



XVI 
THE WAY OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 

We are several times in the New Testament reminded 
that "No one hath seen God at any time." That 
means that if in any sense we are to know God, it must 
be through some mean or medium between Him and 
us. The vital question for us is as to what that mean 
is. Again, the reminder that God cannot be seen or 
known immediately or "in Himself," but only medi- 
ately or through something else, conveys to us this 
idea: That He is unknowable in His person, and know- 
able only in His acts or works. " He" or " Himself" is a 
personal pronoun, and assumes the personality of God. 
But are we to stop at the fact of God's being a Person 
in Himself, and remain satisfied with the conclusion 
that He is forever to be knowable or known only indi- 
rectly through acts and never directly or in Himself .^^ 

Let us approach somewhat systematically the answer 
to this question. There are three stages of thought 
on the matter. The first is that which, either avowedly 
or practically, denies personality in God Himself; 
which, as in pantheism or monism, sees in what is 
called God simply a personification of the Principle, 
One and Universal, of all things. God is there Sub- 
stance or Cause, thinkable or knowable only in the 

198 



Way of the Knowledge of God 199 

All of which it is the subject or substance and cause. 
Where there is the denial of universal or divine person- 
ality, there follows logically and practically the denial 
of all, and so of human, personality. Such a monistic 
or pantheistic position is outside altogether of our 
present enquiry. 

There is, secondly, the position of the many who, if 
they do not concede the personality of God in literal 
terms, at any rate question it in the interest, not of 
anything less or lower, but on the ground that the higher 
being and nature of God cannot be thought or expressed 
in the lower terms of ourselves. These, if they are 
consistent and sincere, are practically theists for our 
purpose; if they are really anything more than theists, 
so much the better. My present business is only with 
those who, holding the personality, or something higher, 
of God, assume that such a God must or does, forever, 
let Himself be knowable or known only indirectly 
through impersonal acts and never personally or in 
that which is His true Self. Shall God have given us 
selves, even so capable as they are of knowing Himself: 
so full of aspiration and impulse to know Him; and 
shall He forever remain Himself unknown? The wide 
distinction I am insisting upon is that between a mere 
inferential or speculative knowing about God and the 
direct or personal knowing Himself. I have in mind 
now those who, admitting the former, practically ex- 
clude even the possibility of the latter. If they admit 
any human personal relation to God at all, it is in fact 
personal only on our side, not on God's. That God, 



200 The Reason of Life 

in any sense on His part, or otherwise than through 
exalted thought or emotion on theirs, spoke with 
Abraham or through the Prophets, or manifested 
Himself in Jesus Christ, does not enter into their 
calculation. Faith may have validity as a heightened 
sense of the reality of things imagined or inferred by 
ourselves; but as an actual experience of a real personal 
meeting with us of God, or communication to us from 
God, it is out of the question. The heavens are sealed, 
so far as any response from them is concerned; we are 
shut up to what we may infer or conjecture or guess 
from what we know of the world and ourselves: any 
transcending of that is only within the limit of our 
own personal aspiration. 

Is there any real personal knowing of God — any 
true meeting, not only of us with God in faith, but of 
God with us in grace? Supposing that there is, we 
shall have to distinguish between the ordinary instances 
of it assumed in all acts of faith or prayer, or in divinely 
instituted answers of grace, as sacraments — between 
these and those extraordinary and exceptional instances 
which have prevailed and remained as revelations to 
and inspirations for the whole world. Such are those 
to which I have alluded: the permanent establishment 
of faith and promise of grace through Abraham; the 
voice of God uttered through Moses and the Prophets; 
the Word of God spoken and the Life of God manifested 
in the person of Jesus Christ; the degree or amount of 
permanent inspiration for the world to be found in the 
New Testament as the record of Christianity. 



Way of the Knowledge of God 201 

Before entering upon these questions of degree, let 
us first consider the whole matter of kind. If there is 
personal relation at all between God and us, the modes 
and varieties of it are only matters of detail. Any at 
all involves and establishes the possibility, and even 
probability, of all. Personal relation carries with it 
the larger truth of transcendent relation between us 
and God. It means that what we call "spirit" within 
us is not hmited to what is immanent in ourselves or 
in the natural process of which we are product and part, 
but is organ and mean of intercourse and relation with 
the Spirit that is without, as well as within, the world 
and ourselves. 

Supposing that God is Spirit and is Personal, and that 
we are finite spirits and persons, made for personal 
relation and intercourse with Himself — but only as 
by evolution, and by growth through use, we acquire or 
make the spiritual faculties and capacities involved in 
that interrelation: how then may God be expected to 
enter spiritually or personally into the world thus 
making for personal knowledge of and union with Him? 
We may be sure that He will never begin to be person- 
ally known through any mere processes or phenomena 
of what we call nature, nor of ourselves as products 
and parts of nature. The kind of knowledge we are 
speaking of, that not of inference or conjecture but of 
personal acquaintance, cannot come through things 
but only through persons. The order and processes 
of nature, the most stupendous or marvellous of physi- 
cal phenomena, may reveal something about God; 



202 The Reason of Life 

they cannot reveal Him. Even though the fact of 
personahty might be revealed through a physical act, 
the face of it, the Person HimseK, is not visible in any 
mere act as such. Nothing whatever that even God 
can make or do, so long as it is to us a mere thing, so 
long as we speak of it as "it," as we speak of nature, or 
order, or beauty, or goodness as " it," can reveal God 
Himself, but only something about Him — as that, 
for example, " He makes for righteousness." Not even 
the certain fact that we ourselves are persons can do 
more than prove, as I believe it does, that God is 
personal; the certain knowledge that God is a Person 
would still be infinitely far oflE from personally knowing 
God. 

How then shall God make Himself known to us — 
Himself, as distinguished from any mere effect or even 
quality or character of Himself .^^ With certain assump- 
tions we may safely begin. If God as personal and 
ourselves as persons are made for mutual knowledge 
and association — for essentially personal relation, as 
every spiritual instinct and aspiration of our nature 
seems to indicate and demand — then that personal 
relation is both possible and actual, subject though it 
must be to the so slowly eliminated limitations of our- 
selves. For God must not go beyond us, if we are to 
remain ourselves. If " variations " occur even in the 
processes and among the products of mere nature, we 
are prepared to meet them in those of freedom and 
grace to a far larger extent. The potentiality of spirit- 
ual relation to God common to all will be expected to 



Way of the Knowledge of God 203 

manifest itself actually with infinite variability among 
individuals. Life is the great mystery of the universe: 
we know nothing of it but the fact. At no stage of it 
can we say more of it than that it is, and least of all at 
its highest stage, when the finite enters into and becomes 
one with the infinite, losing itself only to find itself. 
We can only observe and study it in its highest expres- 
sions. With whatever of human limitation, error, and 
sin, humanity manifests itself in Abraham as the per- 
sonal friend of God. The exact, scientific, historical 
amount of truth in that one outstanding instance, we 
need not now concern ourselves w^ith. The type has 
passed into the experience of the world, and has become 
universal and permanent. Whatever may be said of 
Abraham, the faith of Abraham is here and is ours. 
Leaving aside for the present the extraordinary degree 
of revelation, of divine promise and prophecy, that 
came to the world through Abraham, we find in the 
ordinary, non-miraculous, exercise of his faith, in that 
which we may and do share with him, the fact we are 
in search of. I mean the fact of a personal knowledge 
of and understanding with God. In Abraham the 
friend of God we have the type and example of personal 
relation, communion, and spiritual participation with 
God, which has reproduced itself in and justified itself 
to all religious experience since. To him we owe 
historically the first expression of the fundamental 
truth of Christianity, the essentially human truth that 
there is no true holiness, righteousness, or eternal life 
available or possible for us save through faith in God, 



204 The Reason of Life 

and from that personal union with God which is His 
gracious presence with and in us through faith. The 
reaUty of such a personal union with God is not a matter 
either of explanation or of scientific proof; it is a matter 
simply of fact and of spiritual experience. Its verifica- 
tion is only with those who have it and know it, who 
can say with our Lord, "I speak that I do know, and 
testify that I have seen." Moreover, the knowledge of 
God which, our Lord says, is our eternal life is not even 
to those who have it an immediate and instantaneous 
demonstration to them of itself. Its truth, not in 
itself but to us, so much depends upon our own attitude 
to it, and the consequent quality and degree of our 
experience of it, that the very variableness and imper- 
fection of our faith keeps it in constant doubt. We 
must remember that our faith is our part in the matter, 
and though the gift even of it is from God, yet the use 
and quality or degree of it cannot but rest with us, 
who are most uncertain quantities. The truth of 
faith therefore, or the truth to faith, the truth of God 
with and in us through faith, cannot rest upon the 
variable experience of individuals. It must rest upon 
the true consensus of experience, which can only mean, 
here as everywhere else, the agreement of the experi- 
ences that are the most genuine and the most complete. 
An experience of the personal knowledge of God which 
on the whole persists, and gives evidence of the perma- 
nent quality and character of persistence, is entitled 
to the claim of all the external verification we are able 
to give it; and within ourselves, that claim may always 



Way of the Knowledge of God 205 

be indefinitely and unlimitedly confirmed by this fact 
of experience: that the more fully we are our best 
selves, and at our best, the more fully are we assured 
of the truth of the knowledge of God; and, conversely, 
the more fully we know God, and are assured of it, the 
nearer we are to our best. On the other hand, the 
more we drop ourselves in the scale of our best being 
and experience, the more certainly and strongly does 
doubt assail the validity of faith and the truth of any 
real knowledge of God. I explain this simply by the 
fact that truth is its own best, and only ultimate, proof; 
and that its best, if not only, direct evidence to us we 
find in our own highest conformity, or in the conformity 
of our highest selves, with it. 

The point so far reached is this: If there is any per- 
sonal expression or manifestation of God at all within 
our world, it can be only in and through a person or 
persons. That can only mean, for us, through men 
or a man. God cannot manifest Himself in mere 
nature, either in the whole or in any particular fact 
or phenomenon of it. Because Himself means His 
personality, and there is nowhere in nature as such 
any "self" or "selfhood" that can manifest or express 
personality. If there be such a thing as religion, and 
if religion is a mutual relation of persons, in which 
alone God's Self is manifested in our world of men, 
then it is only in men, or in ourselves that we shall find 
God in the full sense of Himself, as distinguished from 
His acts. And if not only our natural capacity for 
knowing God, but our actual knowledge of God is, as 



206 The Reason of Life 

everything else with us, an evolution, then we shall 
expect in the world first a wide-spread, if not universal, 
intimation and evidence of the natural instinct and 
impulse to know God. This natural motion or emotion 
Godward will appear very unevenly and variedly in 
individuals and in races; and its most general, rising 
even to universal, manifestations will come through 
transcendently great individuals, as well as through 
gifted races or nations. If, answering to these highest 
reaches and demands Godward, there shall come sup- 
plies of divine response, rising to the height of real 
revelation and inspiration, not only to the extraor- 
dinary individual, but to elect peoples, and to the 
world, it will be what was to be expected. 

Once admit the principle, the probability, or even 
possibility, of divine Self-manifestations or Self-com- 
munications to men, and where shall we stop? Concede 
that God has in any way breathed or uttered Himself 
to or in or through any Abraham, and no one can fix 
a limit to the mode or degree of His Self -revelation or 
Self-impartation to or in the world of men. Thence- 
forth we can only wait and see what, as matter of fact, 
it will please Him to do in the world. 

What it has pleased God to do in the way of Self- 
revelation, manifestation, or communication in the 
world, is just what Christianity claims to be. The 
divine communication comes not through stupendous 
acts or phenomena; God is not in the storm or the 
earthquake or the fire; the kingdom of God cometh 
not with observation. The Self-manifestation is where 



Way of the Knowledge of God 207 

alone selfhood can be, in a Person and persons. God 
reveals Himself in a Person in Whom Himself, His 
personal Self, can be, and be seen; and through Him — 
in us, in whom alone, as persons, He can in all the 
world of our experience be or be seen. In all the actual 
universe, so far as we know or can know it, God is 
nowhere directly knowable save in the person of Jesus 
Christ and in ourselves. The divine Word or Son who 
objectively reveals or expresses Him to us, and the 
divine Spirit who subjectively communicates or imparts 
Him in us, are the only possible media of any direct 
knowledge or experience of God. 

I do not at all assert that there was or is no knowledge 
or life of God outside of historical, organized or insti- 
tutional, Christianity. We are distinctly told that the 
Logos or Word of God was in the world always and 
prior to His taking flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. 
And no less, that the Spirit of God is wherever the 
spirit of man is open to receive Him. The Word of 
God is the utterance of Reason to reason, the Infinite 
to the finite; just as the Holy Ghost is the breath or 
inspiration of Spirit in spirit, the Infinite in the finite. 
And whenever or wherever in the human mind or the 
human heart there has been any degree of response to, 
there has been just so much communication of divine 
intelligence and grace. Religion before and in Chris- 
tianity has always recognized the truth that God is 
greater than any given or appointed system of human 
means, and that His love and grace extend far beyond 
its pale and are as wide as He Himself. I would deny 



208 The Reason of Life 

the presence and operation of God's Word and Spirit 
nowhere where in any measure or degree they actually 
are. What I affirm is only that God — Himself, or 
personally — is known to or lives in us only through 
His Word and Spirit, and only in the response of our 
intelligence and affection to Him through these. 

This brings us fairly up to the question of the relation 
between what we may call the ordinary manifestations 
of God's Word and Spirit and those extraordinary ones 
which have been received as divine revelations or inspi- 
rations; and again, between even these latter and that 
complete Self-manifestation of God in Jesus Christ 
which we receive as the Incarnation of God. God 
from the beginning of the world has spoken to us in 
Prophets. In the prophet as distinguished from the 
ordinary "man of God," or spiritual man, we see no 
more uniqueness in the communication he brings to us 
from God, than in his own elevation, reach, or response 
toward God: He brings us what is truer from God, 
because he himself is higher, more open and receptive 
from God. There are differences and degrees among 
prophets themselves, and so among their prophecies. 
The difference here, therefore, is one not in kind but in 
degree. In great measure the question of revelation 
and inspiration has been determined by reception and 
consensus. What have acquired the dignity and au- 
thority of "Scriptures," New or Old, were practically 
so decided and accepted. The spirit of man " sets its 
seal" upon what is the Spirit of God. There is more 
truth and authority in the common or collective sense 



Way of the Knowledge of God 209 

of the human spirit in time and space than in the highest 
individual reach of the highest men. Even though the 
highest gifts of God do come to us through the highest 
men yet we of the ordinary or common body of men 
are commanded to try the spirits whether they be of 
God. 

If this be true of the high, what shall we say of the 
Highest? There is certainly a likeness and community 
of kind between Jesus Christ and all those who before 
Him, or apart from Him, have manifested God in the 
world. If this is not so, then in the most vital and 
essential respects He was not man as we are — which 
would mean that He was not man at all. We need to 
know our Lord in His sameness with us, if we would 
truly interpret His uniqueness or elevation above us. 

The issue at the present time is between the proper 
or essential deity of our Lord's Person and what there 
is a general disposition to concede as His divinity in a 
lower sense. This lower divinity, in an unquestionably 
true sense, may be defined or described somewhat as 
follows, in terms too of an at least partial truth of the 
Incarnation: How shall we define the precise end of 
what we call the Incarnation? Is it not, that God, in 
a sense or measure, becomes human, becomes man, in 
order that man, also in a sense or measure, may become 
divine? The consummation of the predestined, and 
in the highest sense natural, union and unity of God 
and man can result only through an entrance of Deity 
into humanity, and a consequent participation by 
humanity in somewhat of the nature, character, and 
15 



210 The Reason of Life 

life of Deity. This is not the same as, it is something 
more than, what is ordinarily meant by the "natural 
divinity " of man. That man, as such, or by nature, is 
divine, has certainly a truth in it, if we are to hold with 
the best philosophy that "finite spirits (ourselves) are 
not mere products of nature, but children of God"; 
but that can signify nothing more than a potential 
divinity, the natural capacity for what is divine, which 
however can become actual in us only through personal 
union and unity with Deity. St. Paul expresses the 
matter when he describes us as having been ** pre- 
destined of God unto sonship through Jesus Christ 
unto Himself" — a predestination which must have 
been grounded in nature, though realized only through 
personal act and accomplished relation to God. It is 
this personal and accomplished sonship to God, actually 
realized for us, and to be realized in us, in Jesus Christ, 
that I call "in the highest sense" natural: because it 
expresses, not alone our potential, but our accomplished 
and completed nature. We are not, and cannot be, 
(actually) divine in ourselves; we are so, in faith, and 
shall be so in fact, in Jesus Christ. 

Now if Jesus Christ was the great leader, founder, 
author, finisher of our actual and accomplished destiny, 
of our perfected sonship to God, of all the divinity of 
which our finite nature is susceptible, if He was the 
first-fruits from among us, the first-begotten into the 
fulness of the divine nature and life — how shall we 
not say that His divinity was ours, ours in kind, ours 
only accomplished and completed in degree.'^ It is a 



Way of the Knowledge of God 211 

precious truth — never to be surrendered, and ever 
more and more to be appropriated and realized by us 
— that all that is humanly Christ or Christ's is eternally 
and essentially ours. He is our holiness, our righteous- 
ness, our life, our new birth from above, our resurrection 
from the dead. If in any of these acts, characters, or 
respects. He was not like us, was not actually we, — 
then how can we be He, and all that is His be ours? 

I hold then, with all my heart, the human divinity of 
our Lord, the divinity that was, essentially and in kind, 
ours in Him, and is His in us. But does this contradict 
or deny also the essential personal Deity of our Lord? 
Assuming that fact, and all the truth of the Incarnation 
as the Church holds and defines it, what does all that 
has been said express or affirm? Simply that the 
Eternal Word of God, in becoming Man, became 
"very man," as much "one with us" in His human- 
ity, as "one with God" in His deity. 

The strength of those who hold the human divinity 
of our Lord as against His essential deity lies in the 
fact that we have been too much holding the latter 
against the former, instead of equally holding both — 
and both as equally necessary to the full truth and end 
of the Incarnation. 

I see in Jesus Christ the accomplished and complete 
truth of God in man, and equally the accomplished 
truth of man in God: neither of these truths would be 
accomplished or complete without the other. There 
is the Fact of Life with which we have to do. It is 
impossible for me, it is impossible for Christianity or 



212 The Reason of Life 

the Church, to lower that fact on either side of its 
One indivisible Truth. I see myself in Jesus Christ, 
and equally I see God in Him; I none the less feel 
my infinite distance from God, in also feeling His 
infinite nearness to and oneness with me. I finally 
and forever refuse to see in Jesus Christ, in the One 
Person of Jesus Christ, only the finite human person 
myself, or a finite human person like myself, how- 
ever exalted — and not also the Infinite and Eternal 
Personal Word and Son of God, fulfilling Himself in 
humanity and in me. 



XVII 
WHOM ELSE BUT GOD? 

The vital truths of Christianity the most open to 
speculative question and doubt are the personality of 
God and the deity of Jesus Christ. The practical 
response of the human soul to those questions and 
doubts may be expressed in two utterances taken re- 
spectively from the Old and New Testaments. I do 
not profess to give the immediate or exact interpre- 
tation of the passages taken in their connection, but 
only to apply the words to the expression of the 
complete truths under consideration. 

In reply to all questionings as to the God of Abra- 
ham's faith, or the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, the God and Father whom He professed to 
know and to reveal, the general answer of the soul of 
religion is: If not Him, then Whom have we — or 
What? "Whom have I in heaven but Thee, O Lord? 
And there is none upon earth that I desire beside 
Thee." 

Giving our own widest interpretation to the word 
" heaven," we may mean by it, primarily, all that is 
outside of our world of sensible or natural experience, 
all that is matter of faith and not of sight or science. 
There is no one who denies the existence of such 

213 



214 The Reason of Life 

" another" world; denial cannot go beyond the im- 
possibility of any knowledge or experience of it, any 
communication or intercourse with it. All beginning 
or end, all substance or cause, all ultimate or essential 
reality belong to it — none of which we may know, 
but all which we must in some way admit. Religion, 
the religion of history and of civilization, has written 
upon that other world, which is the postulate and 
correlative of this one, its substance, cause, and 
meaning, the primal ground of all reality, the name of 
God. 

Religion has gone further and transcended the 
notion that the world of the beyond, or of God, is one 
of mere speculative inference and of agnostic admis- 
sion. It claims that, not merely has God not left 
Himself without witness within and through the world 
of sense, but that He has not left us without means and 
capacity for more direct and personal relation and 
intercourse with Himself in the world of spirit. 

Heaven then is not a region, a world, without and 
beyond the reach of human experience, a sphere of 
being unseen and unseeable in itself, known only as 
inference from, as cause and condition of the things 
that are seen. It is indeed without and above all 
purely sensible experience: the search for it which we 
call natural and, at its best, scientific will rightly dis- 
cover itself agnostic with regard to it. The question, 
of which the very fact of religion assumes the affirma- 
tive, is whether there is not an experience of God and 
heaven that transcends mere nature and pure science. 



Whom Else But God? 215 

If we are to admit God at all as the possible or prob- 
able postulate of the things we know — some postu- 
late being a necessity of thought, and none other 
more probable or credible — then it is out of the ques- 
tion to assume that God shall have produced finite 
spirits capable and desirous of personally knowing 
Him, and then have remained personally unknowable 
by or to them. We assume then, with religion, that 
there are divine as well as human means and possibil- 
ities of knowing God. So far from knowledge mean- 
ing necessarily adequate or complete, or even at all 
developed, knowledge, it may begin in absolutely 
the most elementary way, as a bare potentiality. The 
infant knows its mother from the moment of birth, by 
feeling if not by cognition — but by a feeling which is 
already the beginning of cognition. That human 
knowledge of God, human experience of and associa- 
tion with God, should have begun in a thoroughly 
childlike way; that when humanity was a child, it 
should have spoken as a child, felt as a child, and 
thought as a child, is just what our evolutional science 
or philosophy should teach us to expect. 

By heaven then, let us, for the time, mean this 
much more: not merely the world that, in itself, tran- 
scends sense and science; but the world that also to us 
is knowable, however little it may be known, by faith 
— meaning by faith all sense or faculty of the divine, 
of God and the things of God, all potential citizen- 
ship in the kingdom of heaven, that may be proper 
to humanity. Whatever of defect, error, irrational- 



216 The Reason of Life 

ity, or even immorality, might by any stretch of con- 
ception or assertion be alleged against the God of the 
Old Testament, it would be easy to demonstrate that 
the God of religious history as a whole, of the Old and 
New Testaments and of the Christian Church is one 
and the same God. We have only to remember that 
the God of the Old Testament is only the Old Tes- 
tament's conception of God, just as the God of the 
Church today is only the Church's present realization 
and understanding of God. No one would claim 
that we know God unto perfection, or that we 
ought not to be knowing Him more and more per- 
fectly as humanity and the Church grow older 
and more experienced in spiritual or divine things. 
However perfectly God was in Jesus Christ, no more 
was or is actually communicated through Christ to 
the Church than was or is actually received and pos- 
sessed by the Church. No one claims that we know 
either God or Jesus Christ, or the full power and life 
of the Holy Ghost, unto perfection. All that we do 
claim is, that the more of the Eternal Spirit of God we 
have in ourselves, the more we know God in Jesus 
Christ, and the more we know God in Christ, the more 
we know of God in Himself. 

Who then, or What, is the God of our religious his- 
tory, or of our historical experience? I take the Bible 
now for no more than Religion's own Record or History 
of Itself, its Autobiography. In tracing the spiritual 
evolution of the conception or knowledge of God we 
are to remember that it is not the making or shaping 



Whom Else but God? 217 

of objective truth or reality that we are engaged or 
concerned with, but only the story of our own appre- 
hension and understanding of the truth. We need 
make no further claim for that than that it is based 
upon a right principle, has on the whole advanced 
along a right line, and moves toward the right end. 
The God of Christianity may be a truer God than that 
of Hebraism, as the true God is truer than as we know 
and worship Him; but the more or less truth, the 
relativity, is in us not in the reality. It is the same 
God all the way through, imperfectly and progressively 
conceived and known. 

Let us glance briefly at the history of the idea or 
knowledge of God from the beginning of that Record 
of it to which we attach the name of Scripture and the 
sacredness of Revelation. Its first essential feature 
is found in the fact, that in the very terms "Creation" 
and "Creator" is involved and expressed the truth of 
a rational, spiritual, we may say personal, origin, mean- 
ing, and destination of the world. From the begin- 
ning the first word of religion has been that which is 
still the first article of every Christian creed. The 
world begins and ends with, is upheld and governed 
by, is the expression of Reason and Purpose. God is 
neither identified or confounded with the world, nor 
on the other hand separated or excluded from it. His 
Mind, Will, or Word is the immanent and causative 
principle of it, while in Himself He as actually tran- 
scends it as we do our acts or expressions. We are not 
saying too much but too little when we ascribe to God, 



218 The Reason of Life 

in terms of ourselves, intelligence, affection, will, pur- 
pose, character — in a word, personality. 

Religious history has from the beginning had most 
to do with the more distinctively spiritual side or aspect 
of the divine nature. Its primal quality is Holiness. 
Holiness may be defined simply as "what God is"; as 
its correlative and contradictory, sin, is "what is con- 
trary to God." Holiness is not simply a law; it is a 
spirit, a disposition, a nature; and sin is not merely 
transgression of a divine law, it is violation of the 
divine Spirit, a break with the divine nature and 
disposition. 

The Old Testament had fully attained to and worked 
out the truth that Virtue, Morality, Righteousness is 
at once the law of God and the law of life. Right- 
eousness, an obedience to God's will growing out of 
oneness with God's nature and participation in God's 
spirit, is that which alone truly makes or exalts either 
the individual or the nation. The world means God, 
means Holiness, means Righteousness — and is pre- 
destined to end in the New Heavens and the New 
Earth wherein shall dwell Righteousness. 

The Old Testament had already pierced to the heart 
of the matter and recognized, not only the fact, that 
God is holy, but the truth of what holiness is. To say 
that God is holy, is simply to say that God is "what 
He is." It may mean, in addition, that God wills and 
requires in us what He is in Himself; that He condi- 
tions the blessings and blessedness of life upon our 
sharing His spirit and keeping His law: "The right- 



Whom Else but God? 219 

eous Lord loveth righteousness." But to say so much 
is not to say what hoHness or righteousness — and, in 
the true sense, life and blessedness — are. The Old 
Testament, if it did not attain the full and final mani- 
festation and expression, yet implicitly included the 
substance of the truth, that God is Love: that holiness, 
righteousness, life, blessedness, are all rooted and 
grounded in that Love which is the one perfect bond, 
and one bond of perfectness, which, as God Himself, 
is the All in all. 

But what most distinctively the history of the Old 
Testament had to contribute to the growth of religion 
was the development of the principle of faith as the 
human medium or means of participating in the divine 
spirit and nature and so sharing the divine activity 
and life. A function supposes an organ, as also an 
organ assumes a function. As a matter of creative 
evolution, or evolutional creation, it makes no differ- 
ence which was prior and produced the other. The 
point is the present fact or actuality of personal re- 
lationship and intercommunion with God. If religion 
is or exists at all, and is an integral factor in human 
life, and if it is a matter between us and God — ''God 
and the soul, the soul and its God" — then God is 
no mere conjectural inference from known facts, no 
mere conclusion of speculative reason, but an object 
of actual experience and direct knowledge. In some 
way the Eternal Spirit bears witness with our finite 
spirits of the relationship between them, and the mind 
and affections, the will and purpose, the actions and 



220 The Reason of Life 

character, the nature and Ufe of God have entrance 
into and influence and shape those of men. 

The organ or function of the divine within the 
human, our faculty or capacity for God, however 
defined, we call in general faith. It is a matter of 
secondary importance in what sense an Abraham 
walked with God, or talked with God, or was the 
friend of God. It is enough that he was a developed 
instance, the type, of an actual spiritual or personal 
association with and knowledge of God, potential in 
all men but most highly evolved in him. The claim is 
simply this; that human experience, human influence, 
direction, and end, is not only through sense and self, 
but comes also from without and above and leads and 
lifts us beyond ourselves and all our mere sensible 
conditions. That faith in its origins and earliest 
forms should have be^n simple and elementary, that 
its historical traditions and records should have been 
expressed in terms of the ideas and general knowledge 
of the time, is too patent a necessity to insist upon. 
The wonder is not in its childlike expression or in its 
manifest incompletenesses and imperfections. It is 
rather that underneath these it was in principle and 
in essence so infallibly and demonstratively, and there- 
fore so persistently and permanently true. 

The faith of Abraham — as much the father of 
those who believe as Aristotle is still master of all who 
think — is essentially the faith of Jesus Christ, as that 
is forever the faith of all who truly know God. The 
story of Abraham, no matter how we criticise, explain. 



Whom Else but God? 221 

or interpret it, contains in germ the perfect principle 
of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. To the devel- 
oped Christian experience and consciousness, it is 
absurd to think of human salvation — which means 
spiritual and moral, or personal, redemption, com- 
pletion, and destination — by either mere process of 
nature or mere act of man himself. We are so mani- 
festly in no sense either all ourselves, or capable of 
becoming so of ourselves; we are so transcendently 
of God, and God is so transcendent a part of ourselves, 
that salvation in any sense, of redemption, completion, 
or perfection, is unthinkable without or apart from 
Him. When we say that to know God is eternal 
life, we mean that, in the very deepest sense of know- 
ing, we only know ourselves as we know God: God is 
so much of ourselves, so much ourselves, that we do 
not know ourselves at all out of or apart from Him. 

More than this, and consequent upon this — the 
faith of Abraham teaches us that, apart from the 
knowledge and love and grace and obedience, the holi- 
ness and righteousness and life of God, we are as in- 
evitably sinners against Him and ourselves; that is, 
that without faith, which brings us into relation with 
all these and makes us the living subjects of them, we 
are as incapable of being what God is and so becoming 
our true selves — as, without the exercise of right 
reason and free will, we could rise above mere animals 
and become truly men. 

What historical religion owes to Abraham, or to the 
type of faith represented by him, is the defining of the 



222 The Reason of Life 

proper personal attitude of man toward God. This 
attitude has been expressed by the term dependence^ 
by which must be understood nothing less than, not 
only the entire respect in which, but no less the com- 
plete extent to which God constitutes actual part of 
our nature and must enter personally into our lives, 
in order that we may become all ourselves and attain 
all our ends. To say that "in Him we live and move 
and have our being," as the expression of a mere 
immanent or natural fact, as a declaration of the 
speculative truth or belief that God is the underlying 
and containing cause or condition of all that is, is a 
presupposition of religion. But it is not religion merely 
as such; it only becomes religion as, through spiritual 
and moral consciousness, acceptance, and experience, 
the mere natural fact passes on up and transmutes 
itself into personal act — that is, as we ourselves in 
our nature, and not only our nature in us, are person- 
ally living and moving, finding, possessing, and exer- 
cising our whole being, in God. There is no religion 
in the mere immanent relation between us and God, 
nor in any merely speculative or even moral attitude 
toward that relation. All personal relation whatever 
is transcendent, not immanent; and only in such 
personal relation between us and God does religion 
really consist or exist. 

In the story of faith from Abraham to Jesus Christ 
we may trace the historical evolution of the attitude or 
relation of man to God through faith. Abraham 
simply lives in the consciousness of God, believes. 



Whom Else but God? 223 

trusts, follows, and obeys God, finds all his good in 
Him, is the recipient of all blessings from Him. It is 
an implicit and childlike faith; and in such an integral, 
undeveloped faith there is the germ and promise of all 
life and blessedness. But the faith of Abraham and 
that of Jesus Christ are far apart in the evolutional 
development and completeness of an identical prin- 
ciple. In both there is the necessary and inseparable 
element of the trial, proving, and perfecting of faith; 
but while the faith of Abraham moves on elementary 
and temporal lines, the faith of Jesus Christ compasses 
and accomplishes the entire eternal and divine destiny 
of man. 

What is the common principle of all true faith, but 
is realized and accomplished fact only in Jesus Christ, 
is that truth of the proper relation between God and 
man of which we are in search. Whether from the 
standpoint of ethics or of religion, no human being — 
but One — stands even to himself, to the accomplish- 
ment of his law and the perfection of his spirit, in the 
relation or attitude of actual fulfilment. If we are to 
be judged by any standard that humanity has ever 
set, or can set itself, there is no man that can be justi- 
fied by his works — that is to say, by actual obedience 
to his own law and by actual conformity to the spirit 
which he enjoins upon himself. If he requires of 
himself only a perfect manhood or virtue, personal 
and social — courage, temperance, justice, generosity 
— there is none that can justify himself by actual 
standing in these qualities, otherwise than by either 



224 The Reason of Life 

unjustifiably lowering them to a very relative, average 
or comparative, standard, or else by frankly confess- 
ing that these virtues, as virtue in general, are only 
maxims or ideals to him, expressions of what he would 
be and very far beyond what he is. Kant is scien- 
tifically exact in the assertion that man is the natural 
subject of an infinite or perfect law. Before such a 
law he can stand justified even to himself only by an 
illicit lowering his conception of the law to the obe- 
dience he is willing to render it. 

What does this mean but that to himself, to the 
law of his own being and the spirit of his own life, man 
can stand in no relation and can set up no claim of 
fulfilment or actuality? Himself is ever, at the best, 
only a matter of faith and hope to him. He has ever 
to be justified, not by what he is, but only by what he 
would be, by the unattained maxim and ideal of his 
life, by what he believes in, and hopes for, and loves. 
Justification by faith, properly and scientifically 
understood, is the principle of all human life, progress, 
or destiny. We are forever only potentially and pro- 
phetically, never actually, ourselves: we shall be that 
only in the complete possession of our spirits and in 
the full realization of our law. c^^ 

It is here that religion comes in as the only solution 
and completion of ethics. The trouble is that no 
natural, human, merely moral or ethical law is discov- 
erable that will fit man only as he is. And the reason 
is that man never is only as he is: he never is as brave, 
or as temperate, or as just, or as generous, or as any- 



Whom Else but God? 225 

thingy as he ought to be. His true being and self is 
always something beyond what he is. That " always 
beyond" has to be taken into account in the definition 
of his law and in the measure and estimate of himself. 
And there is no limit here, or in present human experi- 
ence, to the " beyond "; no man on earth ever is as wise 
or true or right or good or great as he ought to be, and 
the nearer he is to any of these, the further off he 
knows himself to be. How then shall we go about 
constructing an ethics or a law which shall just express 
what we ought to be and therefore can be here? , 

The universal natural law of evolution seems to give 
us a clue to at least the right statement of the facts 
of the case. Man passes from any previous lower stage 
into that of reason and freedom, or of personality, by 
not merely the acquired potentiality, but the actual 
exercise of his right reason and his free will. In the 
necessary, and necessarily long, process of progressive 
reason and freedom, man must become and be a law 
to himself, must be autonomous. His reason, his free- 
dom, his personality can exist at all, only as his own. 
Reason and freedom are the only proper subjects of 
law, and the obedience of these is its only proper cor- 
relative. There could be no true law if there were no 
rational and free obedience, but neither could there be 
reason or freedom without a law of obedience and 
without obedience to the law. The function of reason 
and freedom is obedience to absolute truth and infi- 
nite right. 

As reason and freedom progress, men more and more 
16 



226 The Reason of Life 

discover at once the absolute obligation and the infi- 
nite transcendence of law. There is no end to either 
truth or righteousness, and there is no compromise 
with either. Does nature, and our own nature — 
does God subject us to an "ought" to which there is 
no corresponding "can"? 

Thus it is that the true ethics of humanity drives 
us to religion. The only law for man is one impossible 
for him either in or of himself. And the explanation 
is that there is no such thing as man in or of himself: 
as a natural fact he lives and moves and has his being 
only in God. And no less, as a spiritual act or actor, 
as a rational, free, and moral personality, as son of 
God, as part and parcel of God Himself, he cannot 
obey his law, he cannot fulfil his nature, he cannot 
be himself apart from God. The greatness and the 
littleness of man are equally incontestable facts. No 
matter what we are, we have no origin and no destiny 
but God. Man can propose no other end or purpose 
to himself than that perfection of truth, of righteous- 
ness, of love and goodness, that fulness and complete- 
ness of divine life which is God Himself. We cannot 
think of God but as the Infinite of all that we our- 
selves ought to be; nor of our own true and right selves 
otherwise than in terms of what God is. As children 
of God we can have no other end or destiny than to 
share His nature and live His life; and we can fix no 
other limit to that aim and intention than "to be per- 
fect as our Father in heaven is perfect." 

This is, of course, assigning to man an infinite law 



Whom Else but God? 227 

and an impossible obedience; but it is based upon the 
fact that he is partaker of an infinite nature and the 
subject of an immortal life. What else or less can be 
meant by the now largely professed faith in the natural 
divinity of man? Once admit for man the fact of an 
infinite or endless law, and express obedience to or 
fulfilment of that law by the term "righteousness" — 
and in what possible relation can a man stand to his 
own righteousness but that of faith, hope, and love? 
What man can feel himself " justified," or lay claim to 
a righteousness satisfactory and acceptable to either 
God or himself? *' Abraham believed God, and it was 
accounted to him for righteousness:" the germ of the 
whole truth of justification by faith was as truly con- 
tained in the attitude of Abraham, as the whole truth 
itself was perfectly fulfilled and expressed by the act 
and in the person of Jesus Christ. There is no way of 
actual righteousness but through identification of our- 
selves by faith with the righteousness of God in Jesus 
Christ: which means simply, that there is no way of 
obeying our law, fulfilling our nature, being ourselves, 
otherwise than by faith identifying ourselves with 
God Himself in Christ. 

"Whom have we in heaven but Thee, O Lord? " 
The Psalmist is right in asserting that we have, and 
can have, none other. The common sense and tradi- 
tional faith of historical religion has made many mis- 
takes about God, but underneath and through all the 
God of its faith has been the One only true God, to 
know Whom is life, and to serve Whom is freedom. 



228 The Reason of Life 

And not only have we none other, but the Psalmist is 
right too in asserting that we have Him. The God 
whom Abraham believed is the God whom Jesus Christ 
so perfectly knew as to personally manifest and reveal; 
it is the God whom, through the Word without us and 
the Spirit within us, we so know, that He is no longer 
merely God — but our God, substance of our life and 
matter of ourselves. 



XVIII 

WHAT ELSE BUT CHRIST? 

I SAID at the beginning of the last chapter that in 
two verses of Scripture we may express our final atti- 
tude toward all questionings of the essential truths of 
Christianity, the personality of God and the deity of 
Jesus Christ. The first was, "Whom have I in heaven 
but Thee!" — by which simple words I would under- 
stand two things: First, that in the world beyond or 
without sense and self, which no one can deny, and of 
which no one is independent, there is none else and 
nought else that we have or can have but only the One 
God of our historical religion. In the second place, 
that we have Him, by an actual communication and 
impartation of Himself, and by an actual consciousness 
and experience of our own, against which no counter 
evidence or reasoning from without will be of any 
avail. The least fact of an actual experience is proof 
against the strongest conclusion of mere speculation; 
and there is no argument against the essential fact or 
facts of religion that is not speculative. The lack of 
experience or evidence in some, no matter how many, 
will never disprove the fact of it in others, no matter 
how few. As long as we have God in the world, God 

229 



230 The Reason of Life 

will be in the world of those who have Him. And 
they will not give Him up for the simple reason that 
the Psalmist gives: "Whom else have they in heaven, 
in all the 'beyond' of their poor selves and their inchoate 
conditions or attainments? Whom else have they in 
the heaven of redemption and completion, and what 
is there on earth to be desired beside Him?" 

Let us now turn to the other words in which we may 
no less simply and satisfactorily express our reply to 
the doubts and questionings that assail us on every 
side. In a turning-point of our Lord's ministry, the 
high claims and strong assertions which He was begin- 
ning to make about Himself caused many of His then 
numerous disciples to withdraw from Him and give 
Him up. "Jesus said therefore unto the twelve. Will 
ye also go away? Simon Peter answered Him, Lord, to 
whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal 
life." 

" Thou hast the words of eternal life ! " I will pass 
at once to the fuller and fullest import which these 
words were not long in acquiring. In fact, even at 
the time, St. Peter goes on to base his valuation of our 
Lord's words upon faith in His person: "We have be- 
lieved and know that Thou art the Holy One of God." 
It is not alone that our Lord spake words of eternal 
life — He was the Word of eternal life. That Jesus 
Christ is personally identified with the Logos or Word 
of God is a truth wider and higher than I am at present 
concerned with. That as man, and simply in His 
humanity. He was God's "word of life," as St. John 



What Else but Christ? 231 

designates Him, is that part of the greater truth to 
which I would Umit our immediate attention. 

God's words, we have been told, are not " grammati- 
cal vocables," they are things and persons. That our 
Lord was " the word of life " means at the very least, 
that He was the divine expression to us of what life is, 
the way of it, the truth of it, and the fact or actuality 
of it. That the life thus manifested was essentially 
" our " life, there can be no question. It was manifested 
that we might know and share it; the whole issue pre- 
sented to us is that of making it our own, which we 
could not if it were not ours in kind. It is the primary 
truth of Christianity that Jesus Christ came into the 
world to be its life, to be our life — which He could 
not be, if He were not that which God predestinated 
us, and our nature constitutes us, to be; short of which, 
consequently, or other than which, we are, at the very 
least, not yet ourselves. The life of Christ would not 
be our life, if it were not, in very truth, that in Himself: 
if He were only a painted picture and not the full 
reality of ourselves. The evolutionally completed 
truth of ourselves which we recognize in Jesus Christ 
may be described in three stages: 

First was the stage of mere nature, which man out- 
grows and transcends in the very fact or act of becoming 
man. Whatever he was before, from the moment of 
becoming finite spirit or person he is no longer mere 
product or creature of nature. His life becomes his 
own or subject to himself so soon as the " self " is there 
to take charge of it and become accountable for it. 



232 The Reason o/ Life 

The second stage is that of freedom and of law: life 
is no longer the act of nature in the man, but the act 
of man in his nature. His nature and himself becomes 
a law to him, which it is his part in life to realize and 
fulfil. All law, social, civil, or religious, is but the vari- 
ous expression of that one law. If that were all, what 
we call ethics or morals would be the sole and sufficient 
science or art of human life. If the one real require- 
ment of life were that we should fulfil our nature or 
law and be ourselves, then we should be able by obeying 
our law to become ourselves. But human nature, by 
an experience sufficient for all who undertake to live 
and not merely to speculate about life, knows that it 
can neither deny its law nor fulfil it, and that if that is 
all that there is for life, nothing awaits it at the last 
but failure and confusion. Man can never be released 
from his law, nor be satisfied with his own obedience 
to it: which simply means that he will never be himself, 
in or of himself alone. 

Nor was it ever his nature or his destiny to be himself 
in or of himseK and apart from the source and ground 
and end of his being. He has indeed no nature which 
he may not ultimately fulfil, nor law which he may not 
obey, nor self which he may not realize, but the part 
cannot, in any sphere or plane of its possible being, be 
independent of the whole, nor the stream of its source. 
If physically or metaphysically we live and move and 
have our being in God, it cannot be that rationally 
and morally, and still less spiritually or in the highest 
reaches and functions of ourselves, we can live and move 



What Else but Christ? 233 

and have our being without God, apart from our per- 
sonal knowledge of Him and of His personal interest 
and influence in us. 

God shows us in Jesus Christ that man not only 
may be divine, but is destined by his nature, and by his 
own act in his nature, to be divine. But it is neither 
in his mere nature, nor by his mere act in his nature — 
what the Scriptures call by his works or by the law — 
that he is or becomes divine, but only by the perfect 
identification of God with himself and of himself 
with God. He must be wholly of God in order to be 
wholly himself — his holiness, his righteousness, his 
life all God's and not his own, but all his own now 
because God's in him. 

Jesus Christ stands to us for a distinct definite third 
stage in human evolution, which no denial will elimi- 
nate, and the essential principles and characteristics 
of which we cannot overestimate. It is not too much to 
call it a "new creation," a "regeneration," or a "resur- 
rection": it is in fact all three, and it is just our failure 
to recognize and realize all this in Jesus Christ that is 
now the so-called decadence of Christianity. The 
claim of such a third stage in life does not imply the 
existence of what has been called, or treated as, a dead 
line of separation between stage and stage. There is not 
the difference and distance between Adam and Jesus, 
the natural and the spiritual, the unregenerate and the 
regenerate man, that there is between inorganic and or- 
ganic, or between animal and man. Man is, potentially 
at least and constitutionally, ab initio all three, natural. 



234 The Reason of Life 

moral, and spiritual; and he is actually and completely 
all three in the ideal end of his evolution. But it is 
not too much to say, that the essential characteristic 
of the third stage is not the immanent physical fact 
that in God we live and move and have our being, but 
the transcendent spiritual fact that, consciously, freely, 
personally, we are living, moving, having and exercising 
our being in God. This, if it means anything, means 
that God is, at the least, as personally in us as we are 
in Him for life, that our life is as truly His as His is 
ours. And this being so, it is not too much to claim 
that the life which God lives thus personally in a man, 
and the man lives thus personally in God, is sufficiently 
different from and superior to the life the man can live 
in and of himself to be called a regeneration, a new 
creation, a resurrection. We should not say that 
either the Word or the Spirit, which too are God, and 
through which God reveals and imparts Himself to the 
world, was not in the world prior to their incarnation 
in Jesus Christ. Nor would we say that God, by His 
Word and Spirit, is not in any and every man prior to 
what we call his conversion, and is not even accomplish- 
ing, in many, many of the fruits of a real conversion; — 
but it cannot be denied that God is in us for conversion, 
to impart to us a life that is not our own, to make of 
us a new creation, to raise us up out of inevitable 
death in ourselves into an assurance of completed life in 
Himself. Conversion is nothing more nor less than such 
an attitude toward God as is compatible with His ac- 
complishing Himself in us and imparting His life to us. 



What Else but Christ? 235 

The essential point in Christianity may, and must, 
be regarded from opposite points of view, if we would 
truly comprehend it. Looking at it from the divine 
side, we say that God has in the person of Jesus Christ 
accomplished in us and for us all that properly con- 
stitutes our salvation; that is to say, all our redemption 
from sin and death, and all our attainment of holiness 
and life; that is to say again, all fulfilment of our 
nature, all realization of our law, all acquisition and 
achievement of ourselves — in a word, all holiness and 
righteousness and eternal life. Faith sees, hope fore- 
tastes, love possesses and enjoys all this completed 
fulness of divine grace in Him in whom, as not only 
First-begotten of God, but also first-born of men, God 
foresaw and foresees us all. When we look from this 
side upon human salvation in Jesus Christ, we properly 
see nothing but God in Him or it — God Manifest, in 
the flesh indeed, but so Himself manifest, that the flesh 
is only the all but invisible veil through which we see 
Him. 

But now I contend that all that would be incompre- 
hensible and meaningless, if we did not add the other 
side to it, and that with exactly equal fulness and 
unqualifiedness. Looking at human salvation from 
the human side, we say that humanity in the person of 
Jesus Christ has — not by any mere fact of His human 
nature, differencing it from ours; nor yet through any 
mere fact of His human self, differencing Him from us; 
but in our actual nature, and wholly as one of us — 
accompUshed for itself, and for us all in it, all that 



236 The Reason of Life 

constitutes our salvation or is expressed by it. It is not 
truer that salvation is all the work of God in us in Jesus 
Christ, than it is that it is all the work of man in God, 
in the person of Jesus Christ. We have as surely to 
work out our own salvation as God works in us to will 
and to do the things that make for and constitute our 
salvation. 

All that is true of us in the matter is equally true — 
only in highest degree — in Jesus Christ; His salvation 
can be ours, only as ours was His. How our salvation 
was also — and first, in its perfection and completeness 
— that of Jesus Christ, may more easily be illustrated 
than explained. For our present purpose we may take 
the position assumed and habitually maintained by 
St. Paul — namely, that salvation is synonymous or 
identical with righteousness. To be spiritually, mor- 
ally, and physically or metaphysically, all that we ought 
to be, would be at once, as an act, righteousness, and, 
as a fact or condition, salvation. There is nothing 
truer to ultimate experience than the principle that all 
truly human, and not merely animal, pleasure, all 
happiness or blessedness, is an act, and not merely an 
affection. It is in what we are or do, in fulfilment of 
ourselves, and in nothing that only comes to us without 
entering into our own being and doing. Aristotle 
defines happiness as an energy, by which he means 
self-realization, the actualizing of all that is potential 
in us. We make all real happiness or blessedness that 
we can have, and God Himself can be or do no more 
in us, personally, than we ourselves are and do in Him. 



What Else but Christ? 237 

It is all He, but it must be all we also; what He is in 
us is measured and limited by what we are in Him. 

We speak of Jesus Christ the Righteous, in the lan- 
guage of St. John. And in Him we recognize, with 
St. Paul, " a righteousness of God " — that is to say, a 
human righteousness which is, nevertheless, of God, 
which indeed is God in us, God our righteousness. 
For all that, it was, in the very truest sense, in the only 
possible true sense, distinctively and essentially a 
human righteousness, a righteousness wrought by man 
— only, where alone it can be, in God. The righteous- 
ness of Jesus Christ, if it was ours as well as God's, was 
wrought by us as well as by God in Him; under the 
human conditions and by the human methods and 
powers of us all in Him as well as by the presence and 
power of God in Him. As to the fact that the human 
righteousness of Christ was actually wrought under 
all the essential conditions, and subject to all the laws 
and processes of a truly human righteousness, we 
must, I repeat, have recourse to illustration rather 
than to explication or analysis. 

Attention has been called to the fact that, much as 
our Lord insists upon faith in all others, large part, 
if not the whole, as He makes it in all our personal 
relation to God, He never speaks of it as describing 
or expressing His own personal relation to God. This 
is all very true, and requires not only consideration 
but explanation at our hands. I attach all the impor- 
tance to it that it demands. But I do not account for 
it or value it on the grounds it has been used to estab- 



238 The Reason of Life 

lish. The inference drawn from the above fact when 
carried out to its full conclusion comes to nothing less 
than this: That our Lord in His human life was inde- 
pendent of faith for His knowledge of and His general 
status and relation with God. It is only part of the 
larger assumption that His entire consciousness was 
of that immediate and direct kind which belongs to 
God alone, and not, like ours, mediate and derived. 
On the contrary, if our Lord was not subject to our 
own human law of faith, we cannot but realize in all 
the consequences His utter unlikeness to us in every 
respect in which His life has significance and value for 
us. He is not one of us; His experiences, temptations, 
victory, His death and resurrection are none of ours; 
His holiness, righteousness, divine life are His alone, 
between which and anything we can be there is no 
possible likeness or connection. 

How was our Lord tempted in all points like as we are? 
What was the essence of that temptation which was 
the distinguishing trait of His earthly condition, and 
victory over which was the crucial and crowning point 
of all His earthly achievement and attainment? All 
His trial was the trial of faith and all His victory the 
victory of faith. It was the distinctive probation of 
man, the test and proof of the distinctive principle of 
human salvation and eternal life. "In the world ye 
shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have 
overcome the world." And "What," asks the Apostle, 
"is the victory that overcometh the world, but our 
faith?" There is no conquest of or victory over the 



What Else but Christ? 239 

world other than human faith. It is absurd to talk 
of God's victory over the world; the very terms are 
applicable to man alone, and their applicability to 
him is of the very essence of his nature, his condition, 
and his business in the world. 

And when we come to analyze our Lord's actual 
temptations, it is not less plain that they are all directed 
against faith, and that His victories over them are all 
victories of faith. The contradictories of faith are 
doubt, presumption, and self-seeking : to question God, 
to presume upon or tempt God, to seek ourselves under 
the guise of serving God, these are the three subtle 
dangers in surmounting which we overcome the world. 
The acme of human faith is when, in some supreme 
moment of new, or renewed, birth from above, literally 
or metaphorically (but none the less really) the heavens 
are opened above us, the Spirit descends in sensible 
form, and we hear the voice of God, *' This is my beloved 
Son." The extreme of temptation i^ when, in some 
wilderness of bewilderment, fear, and doubt, our own 
weakness, the impossibilities of our task, the supremacy 
of the powers of darkness rise up before us, God seems 
infinitely far off, and the temptation comes home to 
us, " If thou art the son of God, command these stones 
that they be made bread." 

Or, when we have, by the grace of God manifested 
in our faith, mightily overcome that first and deadliest 
temptation — the temptation to let go our hold upon 
God and lose our sense of victorious sonship; then, 
upon some giddy pinnacle of perhaps exalted reaction 



240 The Reason of Life 

from all doubt or distrust of God, the opposite tempta- 
tion assails us: we expect of God that He will sustain 
us by miracle, that He will save us without our- 
selves, or through us save others without the use or 
necessity on our part of common sense or natural 
means. 

Or again, with all faith, and with all zeal and practical 
wisdom, there is the temptation to conduct the kingdom 
of God upon principles and lines of worldly success and 
enterprise, of selfishness and pride, of earthly advantage 
and human ambition. There is such a thing as a serv- 
ing God with observation, success, and applause with- 
out, that, within, is a falling down to and worshipping 
Satan. 

The humanness of our Lord's temptations and vic- 
tories is all their meaning and virtue to us. His earthly 
life is the triumph of human sonship to God. In the 
invincible faith and inextinguishable hope of that divine 
relationship we have the sole and essential principle of 
eternal life : where these are, God is, and the life in which 
He is is indestructible. That is the human explana- 
tion of the fact with regard to our Lord, that "He could 
not be holden to death." What constitutes Jesus 
Christ our High Priest, our consummated Representa- 
tive in matters relating to God, that is, in the matter 
of our relation to God, is that He is a "Son perfected 
for evermore" — perfected too "through sufferings," 
by the painful but necessary discipline of temptation. 
Such a sonship, so achieved, is essentially a human one, 
is in all points ours, save that it is "perfected" — that 



What Else but Christ? 241 

is, it is ours as yet only in faith and hope, not yet in 
attainment or possession. 

The perfection of sonship to God is not only in 
and through conquest of all question or doubt of our 
relationship and oneness with God through His all- 
prevailing oneness with us; it requires on our part an 
actual and practical human obedience in all natural 
and moral respects: we owe to Him all the natural 
virtues as well as all the spiritual graces, all fulfilment 
of nature and realization of ourselves as well as serv- 
ice of Him. In fact the natural and the spiritual 
in us, the human and the divine, are not separate 
compartments, distinct elements in our being; each is 
perfected and complete only in and through the 
others, and all are one in an organic whole. What 
we supremely recognize in Jesus Christ is not alone 
the perfect spiritual, but, realized in it also, the per- 
fect natural and the perfect ethical or moral. If in 
any way the supernatural in us supersedes or impairs 
the natural and the moral, it is to the detriment of 
the wholeness and completeness of a process and a 
product which are all divine. Our human Lord is 
human through and through, none the less divine for 
being human, nor less divine in any part than in all. 

The crowning trait of our Lord's human fidelity to 
God, or to His filial relation, was manifested in His 
utter refusal to entertain the slightest suggestion to 
mingle high motives or principles of personal or social 
conduct with concessions to human expediency or 
policy. The third temptation in the wilderness was 
17 



242 The Reason of Life 

no doubt the suggestion to link the great cause of the 
Kingdom of God with expedients or poUcies which 
would have given it earthly success and world-wide 
dominion. Absolute truth, eternal right, perfect love 
and goodness were His sole principle and policy, alike 
for Himself, for others, and for God. Any worship of 
earthly success, efficiency, power, or glory, at the ex- 
pense of truth, or justice, or love, was a bending the 
knee to that which is not God; any suggestion to avoid 
one consequence, to decline one drop of the cup of 
failure or pain or shame that might come in the train 
of simple obedience to the perfect law, was, though 
from the mouth of his nearest and best, to be met only 
with the "Get thee behind me, Satan!" There is no 
question that Jesus Christ meant to build His kingdom 
upon the one, practicable as well as ideal, principle of 
perfect love, ensuring perfect justice, and realizing 
perfect truth — that is, the universal reign of God upon 
earth. I say the perfectly practicable principle of love, 
for though it may not be practicable in the sense of 
our being able to establish it yet it is, in the sense 
that, if it were established, it would, even on this 
earth, work to perfection for each, for all, and for 
God. Perfect love would carry with it the natural 
and complete fulfilment of all law. 

It is upon this general line that I would express our 
concurrence with those original disciples of Jesus who 
to His enquiry, "Will ye also go away?" could only 
reply, "Lord, to whom shall we go?" Where else 
shall we find the Life, which is ours, and apart from 



% 



What Else but Christ? 243 

which we are not ourselves? There is none other 
name under heaven, given among men, wherein and 
whereby we may receive health and salvation. 

If, then, the life of Jesus Christ is the life of a perfect 
human faith, how is it that, in prescribing faith as the 
condition of life to all others. He never ascribes it to 
Himself as the source of His own life? The answer to 
that question we must reserve to another chapter. 



XIX 
THE DEITY AND DIVINITY OF CHRIST 

The question upon which we have come may be 
answered under a discussion of the two sides of a 
current controversy. The question is between the 
mere relative divinity of Jesus and His essential or 
absolute deity. By the former we understand that 
what is revealed to us in Jesus Christ is the innate 
natural divinity of humanity, that divinity actualized 
in His person to the highest degree, through His own 
unique human consciousness and realization of it. 
Because He of all men most perfectly apprehended 
the fatherhood of God, and so most perfectly fulfilled 
and manifested the common human sonship of us all 
to God, therefore in Him supremely God is revealed 
in His relation to us as Father, and we are revealed to 
ourselves in our relation to God as His children. This 
does not necessitate any conception of the person of 
our Lord as different from ours in kind, but only in 
degree. He is the divine man, man as he is from 
heaven and God, and not merely as he is from earth or 
nature. As such He is only what we all ought to be 
in fulfilment of our natural derivation from God and 
destination to God. 

As contradistinguished from that view of the essen- 

^4 



Deity and Divinity of Christ 245 

tially human divinity of Jesus, it is not necessary yet 
to restate the traditional Christian doctrine of His dis- 
tinctive deity. That will appear in the end; in the 
mean time I wish to emphasize the fact that, in such 
controversies, the truth is never to be found in one side 
to the exclusion of the other. In this particular case, 
the whole positive contention of those who affirm the 
essentially human divinity of Jesus is impregnable; it 
is only their negation of the concurrent truth of His 
actual deity also that we have to take issue with. I 
myself have no hesitation in denying any presence or 
operation of real deity in Jesus Christ as manifested 
otherwise than in the fact of His accomplished and 
perfected human divinity. There is no realized actual- 
ity of man in God that is not equally the fulfilled 
actuality and living presence of God in man. God was 
in Christ for human redemption and completion, that 
His divine fatherhood should fulfil and satisfy itself 
in our human sonship, that His eternal purpose and 
our natural destiny should be accomplished in the one 
divine-human act in which He "becomes" our Father 
and we His children. Outside of the effectual accom- 
plishment of this end, I see no proof of or reason for 
any exploitation of deity in the person of Jesus Christ. 
On the other hand, there is not one evidence or ex- 
pression of deity in Jesus that is not resolvable into 
the direct and necessary action of God in the redemp- 
tion and completion of humanity, manifested in the 
self-redeeming and completing activity of humanity 
in God. The resurrection itself was the perfect grace 



246 TJie Reason of Life 

of God acting through the perfected faith, love, and 
obedience of man. It was "our" death to sin and hfe 
to God, "our" redemption from sin and death through 
our resurrection to holiness and life. 

Our Lord began His ministry at the age of thirty. 
God could already say of Him, "This is my beloved 
Son, in whom I am well pleased." That was no 
recognition and approval of a divine, but manifestly 
of a human sonship: only what our Lord was in His 
humanity was subject or matter of divine commenda- 
tion. His perfect sonship was that of a perfect faith 
in and relation to God; and yet that very faith in His 
own sonship was, from the constitution of human 
nature and the conditions of human life, almost im- 
mediately and all through His stay upon earth, the 
subject of fierce temptation and bitter trial. It was 
through this very fact that our Lord's life upon earth 
was one also of the constant, unbroken though not 
untried, victory of faith; so that He could say at the 
last, "I have overcome the world." It was given to 
Him in the moment of the concentrated power of dark- 
ness against Himself to "see Satan as lightning fall 
from heaven"; and to hear the word of God, "Sit 
Thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies 
thy footstool." 

The "authority" with which Jesus spoke and acted, 
as apparent to us in the record as it was evident to 
those who saw and heard Him, and causing them to 
say, more truly than they knew, "Never man spake as 
this man," was indeed the authority , not only of perfect 



Deity and Divinity of Christ 247 

truth, but of perfect knowledge of the truth. But it 
was not in Him, at the time and under the conditions 
of His humanity, the direct and underived knowledge 
of Deity: it was not God speaking as God. In the 
Sermon on the Mount, for example, our Lord speaks 
with the authority of the truth itself. But it is the 
truth incarnate, speaking out of the certainty of a 
perfect human experience and knowledge of it. Not 
only the truth but God Himself — for they are the 
same — spoke in Him; but it was God in human 
intelligence and understanding. It all came up in 
Jesus, and came forth from Him, as what He Himself 
had tried, and proved, and knew: "I speak that I do 
know, and testify that I have seen." It is not that 
Jesus did not truly, and even divinely, know all He 
taught; but it was the knowledge of one who, as He 
Himself expresses it, had *'seen" and "heard" and 
"received" all that He had to communicate or impart. 
He never spoke or acted or judged "of Himself" but 
only as God did so through Him. In a word, the 
truth, and the beauty, and the good to us of all that 
Jesus was or said or did, lay in the fact that in Him 
we have a perfect experience and knowledge of "our 
own," of God in human life and of human life in God. 
I would say therefore of the knowledge of God and 
of Life, manifested by our Lord in His earthly atti- 
tude and activity, not that it was the knowledge of one 
who was independent of the faith by which alone we 
know God, nor of the hope in which alone, for the most 
part, we really possess Him — but rather, that it was 



248 The Reason of Life 

the knowledge of one in whom faith is so perfected 
into sight, and hope is so completed in possession, that 
he has transcended the means and attained the end, 
and no longer remembers the way in the perfectness of 
the arrival. But our Lord never forgets that His way 
is ours also, and that where He is we too must come, 
and see as He sees and know as He knows. 

Thus in the Beatitudes with which the Sermon on 
the Mount opens, the force and application are largely 
lost, unless we see in them the principles and basis for 
a philosophy of the highest life drawn from the experi- 
ence of one who had sounded all the depths and attained 
all the heights, and who knew at first hand all the 
secret of human blessedness. "Take my yoke upon 
you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in 
heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls." The 
humility and love which He taught He had Himself 
learned, the rest He promised He had Himself enjoyed: 
"Learn of Me" — from what you see in me, and not 
merely from what you hear. 

From all this it is apparent that what I see primarily 
in Jesus Christ is the divinity of our humanity, a divin- 
ity potential only in the beginning, and consisting in 
a natural relation and in a capacity for personal union, 
but in the end, as in Him, perfected into a personal 
oneness with God; in Whom, and of ourselves, we now 
indeed do consciously, freely, and literally "live and 
move and have our being": now, in Him, "we know 
even as also we are known," and love as we are loved. 
This "in Christ" is not only, as I have frequently said. 



Deity and Divinity of Christ 249 

our supernatural divine predestination, it is no less 
our natural human destination. In Jesus Christ alone 
we come to all ourselves. 

Full admission, then, is to be given to the contention 
that, in the Jesus, not only of history, but of spiritual 
apprehension and experience, the divinity revealed to 
us is one which we are called fully to share with Him. 
It is the divinity of our natural generation or sonship 
from God, realized and actualized by our regeneration 
or spiritual new birth from God in Jesus Christ; that 
is to say, by the operation upon us and in us of the 
divine Word and Spirit manifest and actual in the 
person and work of our Lord. We see in Him at once 
the agency and the action, the energy and the process 
of our own salvation: God's Word speaking life to us, 
and God's Spirit answering life in us. 

The point to which we come now is this: does this 
full recognition and appreciation of the divine hu- 
manity and human divinity of our Lord contradict or 
preclude the traditional and catholic doctrine of His 
personal and real deity? As to what that doctrine is, 
I hold that the true and general Christian conscious- 
ness of the Church is identical with the one mind and 
spirit of the New Testament. I do not hesitate to say 
that the understanding which cannot recognize unity 
in the truth of the New Testament and in the faith of 
the Church is, to say the least, not spiritual enough to 
discern essential identity of reality underneath the 
manifold appearances and differences of individual and 
transient opinion or explanation. In expressing the 



250 The Reason of Life 

mind of the New Testament, as the one thing that does 
not change, I assume that I shall be representing also 
the essential consciousness and experience of Chris- 
tianity. 

When we speak of seeing God in the face or in the 
person of Jesus Christ, we must keep in mind always 
this principle of faith as contradistinguished from ordi- 
nary or natural sight: God is, to the latter, necessarily 
and universally invisible. " No one hath seen God at 
any time"; He is visible, therefore, never in Himself, 
but only in some mean or medium of Himself. He 
reveals Himself thus, for example, in creation; which, 
however it may manifest Him — inasmuch as His mind. 
His will, His power, expressed in it are certainly Him- 
self — is nevertheless not itself He. Now in the very 
highest and completest sense in which God can be 
visible, apprehensible, knowable to us, we say that 
Jesus Christ is " God manifest in the flesh." In what 
else actual or conceivable — sun, moon, or star, action 
of matter, or law of things — can God be so visible, 
what other mean or medium can God have of self- 
manifestation to us, so capable, or in comparison 
capable at all, of revealing and expressing Himself 
to us, as the mind and spirit of Jesus Christ? If we 
are to find God, see God, know God, meet and deal 
with God, in prayer or praise, in worship or service — 
if God and we come together at all or anywhere, where 
shall it be but where, in the person, in the personal act, 
in the death and life of Jesus Christ, God and we are 
at one, and are one? 



Deity and Divinity of Christ 251 

If it is said that we are to find God in nature, I reply 
that I find Him truly and perfectly there only in Him 
in whom I see the end and reason and meaning of 
nature, the only complete explanation and justifica- 
tion of nature. If I am told that we are to find God in 
ourselves, I answer that I do not find or know myself 
except in Jesus Christ, in whom I find myself in finding 
God. The conclusion of the matter is, that if Jesus 
Christ is not God to me, there is no God for me at all. 
God outside of Him is an inference, an abstraction, a 
form or necessity of thought. God in Him enters into 
my consciousness, my experience, my life, myself. He 
is my beginning, the divine Idea in which I was cre- 
ated, or rather which created me; He is my end, the 
divine predestination or fulfilment for which I was 
created. 

If it be objected that we cannot identify Jesus in 
this way at once with nature or man and with God, I 
reply that, in reality, we cannot do anything else. 
Whatever ''outsideness" of things and persons there is 
in God, is not there for us. In Himself He is invisible 
and inaccessible. It is only in nature and ourselves 
that He touches us; it is only in Jesus Christ, the 
eternal Word of God, the Life of nature, the Light of 
men, that He is personally with us and in us, so that 
we know as also we are known. 

There is no question that our crude systems of ex- 
planation have largely obscured and even perverted the 
truth of the Incarnation. But we should remember, 
in the first place, that it is divine truth and not human 



252 The Reason of Life 

explication that is catholic or "of faith"; and, in the 
second place, that human comprehension and elucida- 
tion has always to pass through crudeness and is 
necessarily liable to error on its long way to knowing 
" even as also we are known." The faith of Christendom 
has on the whole been organic, and is to be accepted 
and defended as to its consistent conclusions of fact; 
but even the grounds upon which, in argument, the 
truth has often been established and enforced, are 
still liable to be called in question and to be proved 
invalid. The truth does not ultimately rest upon its 
proofs: there is truth that persists through and sur- 
vives the most manifold inconclusiveness and irration- 
ality of its proofs. The Church has had an unfailing 
instinct and experience of the Incarnation underneath 
the sometimes absurdities and even immoralities of its 
explanations and explications of it. The theory of the 
process of the At-one-ment of God and man in Jesus 
Christ — objectively for us in Himself, subjectively 
in us, in ourselves — by the Word of God to us in 
Him, by the Spirit of God in us through Him — will 
doubtless be always more or less in controversy, while 
the fact will remain and the process continue the same. 
We have not then to demonstrate the consistency in 
itself of our holding together the purely human divin- 
ity and the distinct and essential deity of our Lord; 
nor have we to elucidate metaphysically or scientifi- 
cally the process by which we do so. There are many 
things which we are compelled to hold together with- 
out being able to justify their consistence. What we 



Deity and Divinity of Christ 253 

have to do is to express as clearly as we can the necessity 
we are under to hold them together; in doing this, we 
may safely conclude that the best way is to follow the 
mind of historic Christianity itself. Christianity has 
accepted Jesus Christ as the eternal and perfect Logos 
or Word of God: it has found and seen in Him, not 
only the highest conceivable, but the highest inherently 
possible Self-manifestation and communication of God 
to man. There is both, nothing more of Himself 
communicable to us, and no mean or medium through 
which He could more communicate Himself to us, 
than we have in Jesus Christ. Christianity has been 
first in recognizing the spiritual as well as rational 
unity of the universe. According to it, the divine 
logos — by which is meant the eternal reason, meaning, 
and ground — of all creation, natural and spiritual, is 
one. If Jesus Christ is the Logos of man, then is He 
the Logos of all creation — of, what we should now 
call, all evolution — of which man is final cause and 
crown. And if He is Logos of these, then He is Logos 
of God Himself: that is to say, the full accoimt of man 
is the account of the universe, so far as it has signifi- 
cance for us; and the truth of the universe and of man as 
its end and crown expresses all the account God can 
give us of Himself: outside of that is outside of our 
limit of being or of experience. 

When we speak of the reason or meaning or purpose 
of a thing, the human reason, meaning, or purpose of 
it, we may be speaking of something abstract or im- 
personal, or at least of something no longer concrete 



254 The Reason of Life 

and personal. But the reason of the world, the reason 
of man, the reason of any divine or real creation, can 
be no past or absent or impersonal reason. Creation 
proper exists only by and subsists only in the present, 
conscious and operative, personal Reason and Meaning 
and Cause of it. If Jesus Christ is the divine reason 
of man, then is He the divine reason of all, and then 
He is personal God in all to us. 

Would it be possible for Jesus Christ to be, in any 
real sense, the Divine Man to us, and not be God in 
that Man to us.^^ Could He be perfectly man in God, 
if He were not equally and primarily God in man? 
The trouble is that they who speak most of the natural 
divinity of man, and who see in Jesus only the highest 
expression of that divinity, for the most part use the 
term in a very modified, Aristotelian, sense. Aristotle, 
speaking of the highest human Good, or Happiness, 
practically, but politely, waives aside the popular 
notion that there is anything really divine in it by 
suggesting its divinity in another sense: "If it is not 
actually God in us, at any rate it is certainly the di- 
vinest of things." The natural reason of man, the 
undeniable evidences of reason in the universe, be- 
speak an eternal and universal ground of being which 
we cannot call less than divine. Whatsoever is in 
highest conformity with that ideal is worthy of the 
same title. 

The question to be decided is this: Is Jesus Christ 
the highest reach of man Godward, or is He the perfect 
movement or action of God manward? My answer 



Deity and Divinity of Christ 255 

is that He is both; that He could not be one without 
the other; but that He is primarily and essentially 
the latter, and only by consequence and in effect the 
former. We can draw near to God only as God draws 
near to us and draws us: We love Him because He 
first loved us: We know only as we are known: 

" Every inmost aspiration is God's Angel undefiled, 
And in every O, my Father! slumbers deep a 
' Here, my Child.' " 

The too common sense of divinity as applied to our 
Lord does not practically or really include God at all. 
It means a human ideal, a quality or character of con- 
formity to our own abstract conception or speculative 
theory of God. It is hostile to any actual or personal 
part of God, any real presence and operation of God, in 
the affairs of the world. I sympathize with this gen- 
eral side of thought to the extent that I admit that 
God, even in Jesus Christ, manifests Himself, is present 
and operative, only within and not without, inside and 
not outside of the world and humanity. It would not 
be a valid Incarnation, if God in Jesus Christ were 
present otherwise than in and as all that man is. But 
then, neither would man be all that he is — but is 
only in Jesus Christ — if God were not really and per- 
sonally in Jesus Christ, at-one-ing us with Himself 
by first at-one-ing Himself with us. 

What Christianity wants today is, not an inferential 
or speculative, not an abstract and ideal, but a personal 
and real sense of God. We want, not a conception 



256 The Reason of Life 

merely, but an experience and knowledge of the uni- 
versal true Real Presence: an objective real presence 
of God, everywhere indeed, but manifestly and su- 
premely in the person of Jesus Christ; an objective 
real presence of Christ still in the world, and manifestly 
in His Church and Sacraments; a subjective real 
presence of God through Christ by His Spirit in us, in 
the faithful use and exercise of the divinely instituted 
means of grace. There is nothing more empty and 
ineffectual than a divinity in which there is no real and 
eflfective personal presence of God Himself. If God 
was not really and personally in Jesus Christ, and if 
Jesus Christ is not really and personally by His Spirit 
in us, our Christianity will always merit to be a mock- 
ery and a failure. If God is in Christ, and Christ in 
us, our faith may rest secure. 

The question still remains: If Christ's divinity is 
ours; and if, to be actual and real, it involves in us as 
in Him the personal presence and operation of God 
Himself, then where and how shall we draw the dis- 
tinction in kind between Him and us? Or why draw 
the distinction at all.^^ Will not the claim for Him be 
satisfied in the realized divinity of the whole humanity 
of which He is the head? But in what sense is He 
Head of humanity? And why and how is humanity 
realized in and through Him? The conditions of our 
realization or salvation are as follows: First, we see 
salvation — which can mean nothing else or less than 
redemption and completion — in Him; only in Him do 
we know what it is, how it is, and all that it is. The 



Deity and Divinity of Christ 257 

thing which alone is salvation for us, the process by 
which alone that salvation is possible for us, we see 
accomplished and presented as the supreme end and 
object of our faith, our hope, and above all of our love, 
desire, and effort. Christ's holiness of spirit. His obedi- 
ence and righteousness, His death to sin and life to God, 
are all human facts in Him because they are necessities 
for us: they are the conditions and the constituents 
of our salvation: only in them as acts and facts in 
ourselves are we actually redeemed or completed. 
There was nothing that Jesus did that we are not to 
do with Him, or is that we are not to be in Him. Only 
as we share all His experiences in the flesh. His temp- 
tations, conflicts, death, can we share His attainments 
and realizations in the spirit. His victorious holiness, 
righteousness, life. 

But, in the second place, no human being on earth 
claims here, as de facto, the accomplished work and the 
completed life of Jesus Christ. They are ours indeed, 
but they are ours in faith only and in hope, never yet 
in fact. St. Paul distinctly disclaims having attained, 
and St. John tells us that, if we say we have no sin, we 
deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. In the 
clear light of the perfected salvation revealed to him in 
Jesus Christ, no Christian claims to be saved otherwise 
than in faith and in hope. But faith and hope are both 
only phases and stages of love. No man merely be- 
lieves in or hopes for that which he already sees and 
possesses; but, on the other hand, no man truly be- 
lieves in or hopes for that which he does not sincerely 
18 



\ 



258 The Reason of Life 

care for and supremely desire to possess; that is, 
which he does not truly love. 

In the third place, the gist and essence of Christian- 
ity consists, not alone in the reality and perfection of a 
salvation which is never, in fact or wholly, ours within 
our present experience; but not less in the certainty 
of the faith and hope that, nevertheless, they are ours. 
We are saved in Jesus Christ in whom salvation is 
complete, even though we are not saved in ourselves in 
whom we know that it is very far from complete. But 
how could faith thus become to us, practically, sight or 
knowledge, and hope actual possession, if we did not 
see in Jesus Christ such a direct Word of God to us — 
such a word of truth, of promise, and of power and 
fulfilment, as is sufficient to put reality into our faith 
and certainty into our hope? Christianity is nothing 
less than this: God so in Jesus Christ, so incarnate in 
us in and through Jesus Christ, as to be actually and 
personally, though humanly and progressively, our 
Holiness, our Righteousness, and our Life. All this 
God could never be to us or in us by mere requirement 
or law, but only through the mutual relation and 
action of perfect love: a love which, on our part, can 
begin only in faith and hope, and be perfected only 
through the divine assurance of faith and certainty 
of hope. 

Jesus Christ is thus completely man — none so 
much so as He who recapitulates in Himself the whole 
reason, meaning, and process of humanity. But He 
who is thus its Logos, its divine Idea and eternal 



Deity and Divinity of Christ ^59 

Destination, its temporal revelation and actual com- 
pletion, cannot be merely on a par with the other mem- 
bers of humanity. That which is first and last of a 
series, and which pervades the whole as its ideal prin- 
ciple and causative fulfilment, is more than only one of 
the series. Let us recall an illustration from Aristotle: 
We may call Happiness the supreme Good and End, if, 
as he does, we mean by happiness that which in fact is, 
in itself, the supreme good. Now in that sense happi- 
ness is certainly good, and a good; but it is not one of 
the goods, outside of and in addition to the others. It 
is a good which includes all the others. The whole is 
not only the whole; it is also all the parts, and its 
perfection involves and includes the perfection of all 
the parts. Jesus Christ was man, and was a man. 
But He is also all humanity, and if, in simple faith and 
hope and love, which will carry with them all the 
desire and purpose and effort of which we are progress- 
ively and increasingly capable, we will put ourselves 
and be in Him as He is in us — if we will truly appre- 
hend that for which we are apprehended in Christ 
Jesus; then we shall know in time, though we may 
never be able to explain in terms, the truth and actual- 
ity of an Incarnation which, beginning and ending in 
Jesus Christ, includes and completes us all. 



XX 

THEOLOGY AND ETHICS 

The following chapter is based upon a recent work, 
"The Ethics of St. Paul," by Archibald B. D. Alex- 
ander, M.A. (Glasgow). With that work as a whole, 
as the best and completest exposition I know of the 
ethical teaching and system of St. Paul, I am in entire 
accord. Now, however, I desire to lay even additional 
emphasis upon a particular point, which the author 
himself makes much of. 

In the preface a saying is quoted to the not unfamiliar 
effect, that "for many thinkers St. Paul is as obsolete 
as TertuUian or Calvin." What of fact is expressed 
in these words is to be deplored rather than ignored; 
and I believe that a true accounting for the fact will be 
the most effectual step toward curing or correcting it. 
Why is it that — even from the Christian standpoint 

— St. Paul is largely being abandoned for Christ 
Himself? The cry "Back to Christ" means for many 

— "Back from Paul to Christ," from the metaphysics 
of the Apostle to the simplicity of the Master. Which 
again means the modern deposition of Paul as true 
"theological expounder and successor of Jesus." For 
all this I believe that the theology or doctrinal system 
of popular Christianity has been itself primarily to 

260 



Theology and Ethics 261 

blame, and that St. Paul has suflPered more of injustice 
and misrepresentation at its hands than any of us have 
come as yet to reaUze. 

What I mean is, that most of the Paulinism against 
which modern ethical criticism is so effectually directed 
is that of our successive and traditional doctrinal sys- 
tems rather than that of the New Testament or of St. 
Paul himself. As in general I offer Alexander's " Ethics 
of St. Paul" as a statement of the true ethical Paulinism, 
so I take Wrede's "Paulus" as a type of the doctrinal 
Paulinism subjected to present-day criticism. 

For myself I have carefully reviewed the "Paulus" in 
detail, and the little I shall have to say of it is based 
upon its entire position; but for our present purpose 
I need not go beyond the single pertinent quotation in 
the'* Ethics of St. Paul." Wrede's thesis is the not mere 
difference but actual contradiction between the ethical 
positions of Paul and Jesus. "The preaching of Jesus 
is direct and imperative : man is to submit his soul to 
God's will without reserve: the condition of his salva- 
tion is obedience: it is simply a matter of personal 
(human) decision." "The central point with Paul is a 
divine action — or complex of actions: the Incarnation, 
Death and Resurrection of a divine being — which 
opens to mankind a salvation prepared for man. He 
who believes these divine acts can obtain salvation." 
Running through the entire critique there are two 
assumptions carried out to their limit, for which — 
as has been confessed — there is only too much excuse 
in our traditional theology. The correction of these 



262 The Reason of Life 

assumptions is due to St. Paul, and is, I think, the debt 
of our present-day thinking. 

The first of these assumptions sees in the Christ of 
St. Paul the act of an entirely and exclusively celestial, 
superhuman, or divine person. To Wrede the so-called 
Life in the Flesh, the Redemptive Acts, the Death and 
Resurrection of Christ were not one whit more human 
actions than the antecedent Incarnation. 

The second assumption is, on the human side, that 
our relation to the so-called saving acts of Christ is 
wholly an external one. They are in no sense our acts, 
but only acts performed for us, in which our sole part 
is to believe and accept. The effect of these two 
assumptions is, first, to separate Christ utterly from 
us in His work of active salvation, and then equally to 
separate us from Christ in our work of merely passive 
salvation. 

On the contrary, we have to assert that the very 
Incarnation itself was not a one-sidedly and exclusively 
divine act. We see in it a twofold process in which 
not only is Gad at-one-ing HimseK with, incarnating 
Himself in humanity, but coequally humanity is, in 
the person of Christ, at-one-ing itself with God, in 
furtherance and fulfilment of its own nature and end 
incarnating God in itseK. It would not be difficult 
to prove that the divine half of this process is unmean- 
ing and impossible without the human half. No man 
is in any real sense taken up into God who has not in 
the process wholly taken God into himself — and done 
so in the predestined way of his nature, and in the per- 



Theology and Ethics 263 

sonal fulfilment of himself. In other words, an actual 
incarnation is as completely an act of man as of God. 
Of course even man's part is God's also — Who is All 
in all; but so is all our life, natural as well as spiritual. 
His — in Whom we live and move and have our being. 
So, more definitely, the redemptive and completive 
human Ufe of Jesus was not one whit more truly the 
act of God in His person than it was the act of humanity 
in His person. God redeems or completes no person 
except in and through the act of his own self -redemp- 
tion or completion. Neither can we redeem ourselves 
without God, nor can God without us — in an act 
which must be ours as well as His: it is a matter of 
God in us^ which can mean nothing else than what we 
are and do and become through Him in us. 

It follows that Christ's redemption was through 
death only because His death — the death He died — 
was the actual and sole human redemption; and His 
death could be for us, only as it could be and would be 
in us and of us. So also His resurrection is ours, only 
as it can be and is our own resurrection. If we want 
to understand St. Paul's interpretation of the death 
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we must understand 
them in a sense in which we can and will ourselves enter 
in and share them. Christ's death and resurrection 
must be, as well as mean, our own. 
_ St. Paul's theology is just as ethical as, and infinitely 
more effectually ethical than any mere ethics. His 
God is essentially an ethical God — rightly defined, 
from the agnostic standpoint, as " The Power not our- 



264 The Reason of Life 

selves that makes for Righteousness." The law of His 
nature is the law of His will for us: "The Righteous 
Lord loveth righteousness." And it is the law of His 
absolute requirement of us: "He that doeth it shall 
live by it," and " The soul that sinneth, it shall die." 
That is only the expression of an ontological fact: a 
being's life is its law, and its law is its life. St. John 
sees in Jesus Christ God in us for Life; St. Paul sees 
in Him God in us for Righteousness. But they ex- 
change terms: St. John's life is righteousness — "Jesus 
Christ the Righteous"; St. Paul's righteousness is life 
— "Christ Who is our Life." He is either because He 
is the other. St. John, more implicitly and concretely, 
sees the result, the whole; St. Paul, more explicitly 
and analytically, sees the conditions, the process. St. 
John dwells more upon the Person, St. Paul upon the 
Work; but, if we look deeply enough beneath their 
differences, they give us the same Christ. 

St. Paul's theme then is righteousness; and if he 
makes much of the righteousness he preaches as being 
God's and not our own, he is no less insistent upon the 
necessity and the fact of its becoming our own. The 
great question with him is not so much — as with St. 
John — the What? as it is the How? of righteousness 
and life. And his answer to it is in the two words 
Grace and Faith: grace covering the entire act or part 
of God, and faith including all that of man in the 
divine-human process of our salvation. The insistence 
of Christianity upon the co-actual Godhead and man- 
hood of Jesus Christ means that we must see in Him 



Theology and Ethics 265 

that completion of Grace in Faith which is the only 
perfected Incarnation of God in man. I repeat that 
the man in whom God is really and wholly incarnate is 
only the man who has really and wholly incarnated God 
in Himself. 

No one can deny that in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus 
Christ is Himself the righteousness and the life which 
He offers to the world. He is the Way of both and the 
Truth of both — there as much as in St. John and St. 
Paul. He was lifted up upon the Cross which alone 
raiseth us: He became Son of God in power, as we must, 
through resurrection from the dead. The beatitudes 
He taught He had Himself learned in the school of 
human life — the blessedness that comes from the true 
poverty of spirit, from the right sorrow for all sin and 
evil, from the meekness of love and humility, from the 
hunger and thirst for righteousness, from mercy to 
others, from purity of heart, from the spirit and role 
of the peacemaker. When our Lord commends these 
graces of spirit, this secret of blessedness, He speaks 
from Himself: He says, "Take my yoke upon you and 
learn of me. For I am meek and lowly in heart, and 
ye shall find rest for your souls." It is impossible to 
have all of Jesus in ourselves until we have learned to 
see all of ourselves in Him — sin only excepted. And 
the sinlessness of Jesus ! — it is not that sin was separate 
from Him in our nature, but that He was self -separated 
— which means, for us all, God-separated — from it. 

And, how self -separated? It is not that there was 
less in Him than in us the natural deficiency and 



266 The Reason of Life 

weakness of mere nature, or nature by itself. Nature 
was no more in Jesus than in us capable — however it 
may be susceptible — of holiness, righteousness, or eter- 
nal life. Nor was Jesus any more than we suflScient of 
Himself in our nature, for holiness, righteousness, or 
life. When He took our nature He took our actual 
and absolute dependence upon God, for either the ful- 
filling our nature or the realization of ourselves. Jesus 
needed as we redemption from the deficiency of nature 
and from the insufficiency of self; and He found it 
where only it is to be found — in faith in God. He 
could say with St. Paul, "I know that in me, that is, 
in my flesh, there dwelleth no good thing " : as indeed 
He did say, "Why callest thou me good.^ There is 
none good but one, that is God." It is not that there 
was not absolute good in Jesus, and in His flesh. But 
He disclaimed it for His flesh and for Himself — as He 
always did. It is true that He was, unlike St. Paul, 
unconscious in Himself or in His flesh of any evil thing; 
but it was because God was so in Him, the grace of God 
was so perfected through His faith, that sin was ex- 
cluded. The triumphant human sinlessness or holiness 
of Jesus was God's condemnation and annulment of sin 
in the flesh, and the redemption wrought in and by 
Him is made ours, not only by our faith in Him, but 
by the in-working of His all-conquering faith in us. 

It is said that, while Jesus makes so much of the 
necessity of faith in us. He never speaks of it for Him- 
self: the implication being that His direct knowledge 
is without the intermediary of faith. If so. He was 



Theology and Ethics 267 

indeed superhuman beyond any participation of ours 
in His life upon earth; but the truth is that when He 
says, "I speak that I do know, and testify that I have 
seen," He speaks out of a human faith that has become 
knowledge, as out of a human hope that has attained 
to actual possession. When He says, "No man cometh 
unto the Father but by me," He means that He has 
Himself trodden and opened every step of the way by 
which we become sons through knowing the Father. 

The al'pha of the Gospel, then, is that Jesus Christ 
is Himself the Holiness, Righteousness, Eternal Life 
which He gives to the world. He is the "power of 
God unto salvation to every one that belie veth," 
because that in Him is revealed *'a righteousness of 
God from faith unto faith." The righteousness re- 
vealed in his own moral perfection, wrought, not in 
nature alone, nor of Himself alone, but in and by that 
oneness with God which it is the function of faith not 
so much to effect as to accept: which grace alone con- 
fers. The righteousness of Jesus is the redemption of 
the world because it is its at-one-ment with God, be- 
cause it brings humanity into participation with the 
source and power of its life. 

The human attitude toward God which Jesus 
assumes for Himself — of utter dependence and perfect 
oneness — He enjoins upon and would communicate 
to all. He is conscious in Himself of the accomplished 
relation and character into which that attitude brings 
Him. In Him there is no otherness from God, and 
therefore no sin. In all others there is both; but the 



268 The Reason of Life 

ground and reason of His own sinlessness can be the 
only remedy and cure for the world's sinfulness. If 
God is the only freedom of the spirit, the only holiness, 
righteousness, and life of Him who has found these, 
then is He equally the only redemption and recovery 
of those who have lost these. In the essential principle, 
Jesus puts Himself precisely upon the ground of the 
Publican and the Prodigal: that they were sinners, 
and He alone was not, were opposite operations and 
results of a common alternative: to be or not to be in 
and of God, for conduct and character, is holiness or 
sin, is life or death. He was human holiness, righteous- 
ness, and life — because He sought, not His own will 
or self, but God's only and God: He did nothing and 
was nothing of Himself: His Father worked, and He 
worked: He and His Father were One, and their com- 
mon work was human redemption and salvation, 
human righteousness and life. His resurrection and 
ours in Him, from sin and death, was the end and fruit 
of that joint task of Deity and Humanity, fulfilled 
each in the other, and so made One. All we the rest 
are sinners insomuch and so long as we seek ourselves 
and not God, or until we find our life in Him and not 
in ourselves. 

Jesus does indeed use the imperative: He warns us 
that not one jot or tittle of the law shall pass away 
until all be accomplished: He bids us be perfect as our 
Father in heaven is perfect; because He knows that 
nothing short of that is our salvation and our life. 
But He does not (with Wrede) regard human obedience 



Theology and Ethics 269 

to and fulfilment of so divine a law as a matter of per- 
sonal decision with us, and leave it so. Enunciation 
of their law is separated from actual righteousness and 
life by a wider chasm than mere human decision. 

The doctrinal system of St. Paul, upon which practi- 
cal Christianity has so largely been built, covers mainly 
the following subjects: Sin, the Law, Grace, Righteous- 
ness through faith, including justification by faith; 
the part of Jesus Christ in relation to all these, including 
Incarnation, Death and Resurrection, Redemption and 
Completion. Upon all these points, underneath the 
great differences of representation and exposition, 
there is an actual identity of mind with the Jesus of 
the Gospels. 

Jesus does not teach the sinfulness of human nature 
as such, nor of human selfhood or personality as such; 
but He does teach the sinfulness of all men in their 
nature and in themselves: the fact or possibility of a 
righteousness in and of these He repudiates as abso- 
lutely as St Paul does: sin is as universal and as hu- 
manly incurable with the one as with the other. The 
very term salvation implies a universal condition to be 
saved from: Our Lord is healer of the sick, sanctifier of 
the sinful; and He is so because He is God in them, 
their health, their righteousness, their life. 

Human righteousness, with Jesus and with St. Paul 
alike, is unattainable and non-existent because of the 
absolute spirituality and divineness of its Law. The 
law of man is the spirit and the mind and the life of 
God Himself; how can he acquire these but from God, 



270 The Reason of Life 

or possess them but in God? Jesus and Paul are at 
one as to the matter or content of the one law of God 
and man: it is eternal, infinite, perfect Love. To have 
this is to have everything — but how are we to have 
this? It is not a mere matter of "personal decision" 
on our part. We can love God only as He first loves 
us: we can be in God only as He is first in us: we can 
only apprehend that for which we have been first 
ourselves apprehended of God. 

A man therefore does not love, is not righteous, by 
law. The law, as such, only calls upon his part, it does 
not contribute God's part, in the common act and life 
of love and righteousness. He has a part, and the 
function of the law in calling it out is a very essential 
one; but in doing so the uttermost reach and benefit 
of the law is, not to make him righteous, but to reveal 
to him his own personal incapability of righteousness: 
by the law is the knowledge of sin, and, with it, the 
need of God, which is the necessary condition and 
beginning of religion. This is wholly the mind and 
attitude of Jesus, told in the language of Paul. What 
does our Lord Himself say? — "I am not come to call 
the righteous, but sinners : " He knows not the righteous; 
they are of all men the most repellent to Him, and He 
to them. The types most acceptable to Him are those 
whose language is, "God, be merciful to me a sinner!" 
and "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before 
thee, and am not worthy to be called thy son." 

What then is Grace? It is simply that we are not 
to bring our goodness to God, but to bring it from Him. 



Theology and Ethics 271 

He is not our Father because we are His children; but 
we are His children because He is our Father. He 
does not love us because we love Him, but we love Him 
because He first loved us. In our relations with God 
we are to come to Him with the nothing that we are, 
and receive from Him the all things that He is. Rather, 
as our Lord teaches, God comes to us in His person, 
with all that He is, and makes it all ours before we have 
come to Him: Blessed are the poor, for before they ask, 
before they have known their poverty, already theirs 
is the kingdom of heaven. Heaven is not ours because 
we win it; we can win it only as it is ours and in us. 

The attitude of the Publican, commended of our 
Lord, in contrast with that of the righteous Pharisee, 
as the proper and acceptable posture of man toward 
God, is not one of indifference to or independence of 
righteousness. On the contrary, it is the absolute and 
the sole condition of righteousness; "Blessed are the 
poor: for theirs, and theirs only, is that kingdom of 
God and of heaven," which is "righteousness and peace 
and joy in the Holy Ghost." "This man went down 
to his house justified rather than the other;" God's 
justifications are based upon reason, upon essential 
grounds and conditions. What He recognizes in the 
Publican is the very principle and condition of all human 
righteousness, knowledge of sin, or repentance, and 
dependence upon God, or faith. We have here, in 
toto, St. Paul's gospel: Righteousness not by law but 
by grace, not of ourselves but of God. 

We have in the typical instance of the Publican 



272 The Reason of Life 

a confusion of two distinct though perfectly related 
questions. One is as to the immediate or present status 
of the sinner upon repentance and faith; the other is 
the ultimate result in the sinner of his repentance and 
faith. To say that God justified the Publican expresses 
all of principle that is involved in the later doctrine or 
justification by faith. It means that God accepts in 
us that elementary condition and beginning of all 
righteousness which He sees in our initial faith, as our 
sole part in the then relations between us. The earthly 
father takes his new-born son for what he is. The 
status between them is not to be determined by what 
the son shall be; on the contrary, what the son shall 
be ought in great measure to be determined by the 
existing status between them. We are in God for 
righteousness and life; but that can never be unless 
we are first taken into God without righteousness and 
life. We shall never be in Him by having these; we 
shall certainly have these by being in Him. 

Justification has been set apart to mean our accept- 
ance in God for righteousness upon the sole condition 
of faith, as the mean of the reception in us of God's 
righteousness and life. That initial status of grace is 
never to be separated from its converse truth: if we 
are in God without righteousness, it is only that we 
may be in Him for righteousness: our emptiness is for 
our fulness. Justification by faith as expressive of a 
present or initial status is only a way to the true end 
of actual righteousness through faith. It is through 
the felt want of righteousness, through hunger and 



Theology and Ethics 273 

thirst for it, through faith in it in God, through hope of 
it in ourselves, through persevering and prevaihng love 
of it as God has given it to us, that we, from faith to 
faith, from grace to grace, shall attain unto the glory 
which is righteousness accomplished and life attained. 

The chief seeming differences between Jesus and St. 
Paul are not differences at all, but only harmonies too 
deep for shallow experiences. St. Paul never repeats 
Jesus' teachings or recounts His acts; he has gone be- 
hind these, and is doing what we are still trying to do, 
interpret Himself. He says, as we do, that Jesus is 
Himself what He teaches and does. He is God's love, 
God's grace, God's fellowship with us Incarnate: 
therefore He is also our hoUness, our righteousness, 
our life. The divine righteousness revealed in Him 
for us and as ours is the accompHshed fact of God and 
man at one by grace through faith, and one in the power 
of grace and the holy obedience of faith. 

Without the Incarnation what follows is impossible; 
with it what follows is included and predestined. But 
what follows is not only an act of God in us, it is wholly 
also an act of us in God: and that act is the one thing 
on our part that effects our oneness with God and con- 
stitutes our redemption and salvation, our resurrection 
and eternal life. That which is at once the gift of God 
and the act of man in Jesus Christ is expressed by our 
Lord Himself as "repentance and remission of sin, to 
be preached in His name unto all the nations." Re- 
pentance is nothing else than that attitude towards sin 
which, when carried to its limit or made complete, is 
19 



274 The Reason of Life 

the death to it which Jesus Christ Himself died. The 
remission of it is not only God's but also man's own 
effectual putting it away, by its death in him and his 
death to it. On the other hand, faith is that attitude 
and disposition towards God which, carried to its 
limit or made perfect, is oneness with Himself and 
participation in His holiness, righteousness, and life; 
and which as such is resurrection from the sin and death 
to which we are subject in ourselves alone. 

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the 
natural and necessary consummation of the miracle of 
His life. They but reveal Him to us as the Jehovah- 
Tsidhkenu, the Lord our Righteousness, Who is the 
end of all religion from the beginning, and the predesti- 
nation of humanity in God. 



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